The Doctor's Doctor
by KCS
Summary: John Watson, late of Her Majesty's Army and specifically a tour in Afghanistan, is drifting in London, alone and without purpose, until he meets two very remarkable people who will test his loyalty and change his life forever. Written for sherlockrebang, summer 2012. Triplicate crossover/AU with ACDcanon, DW, and Sherlock. Features Thirteen!Sherlock and Weeping Angels. Gen.
1. Chapter 1

**Title**: _The Doctor's Doctor_  
**Fandom**(s): BBC Sherlock, Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes (canon)  
**Characters**: John Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes/The Thirteenth Doctor, various  
**Rating**: K+  
**Finished Word Count**: 43K+  
**Genre**: AU, gen, friendship, Rebooted ACD canon  
**Warnings/Spoilers**: Spoilers for general Sherlock canon, Who canon (though knowledge of Who canon isn't necessary to understand the story), specific spoilers for the ACD story _The Six Napoleons_. Material taken or adapted from 6NAP and _A Study in Pink _is footnoted, and anything else you recognize from ACD or BBC canon is not mine. Liberties taken with Whoniverse fanon for the purpose of this fic, so don't shoot me if my opinion differs from the mainstream.  
**Disclaimer**: BBC's _Sherlock_ and _Doctor Who,_their characters and plot lines, belong to the BBC and the writers and producers of those amazing shows. The characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson are out of copyright but were originally created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

**Summary**: _John Watson, late of Her Majesty's Army and specifically a tour in Afghanistan, is drifting in London, alone and without purpose, until he meets two very remarkable people who will test his loyalty and change his life forever._ Written for LiveJournal's **sherlockrebang**, summer 2012.

**A/N**: Loyal thanks to my friend, fellow fan, past collaborator, and primary beta, **Protector of the Grey Fortress**, who was the first person to introduce me to The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston = 3) and to later assure me that despite my initial misgivings I would love the BBC Sherlock fandom. More thanks to **Pompey**, for her gracious doing of my dirty work to research for possible poisons used in ASIP and ACD-verse Maiwand and Afghanistan historical accuracy. Both are two of my oldest and dearest cheerleaders in the original Holmes fandom, and I appreciate them both very much. And thirdly, a big giant bow of gratitude to the fantastic **donutsweeper**, who performed the arduous task of straightening my dialogue from the abysmal fandom hodgepodge it originally was, fixing my catastrophic commas, and giving valuable feedback for a fandom I've never before written.

**A/N2:** Special thanks to my talented artist, **naripolpetta**, whose lovely work inspired me to _finally_ write that Wholock fic I've been itching to ever since I discovered the first similarity between the shows' scripts. Please visit the corresponding Master Post page at my LiveJournal (kcscribbler, and the Homepage link is in my profile) to see the artwork.

* * *

**Chapter One**

John Watson was a very ordinary man.

Like so many before him, he had been torn as a young man between loyalty to country and to morality, and had decided to satisfy both portions of those forces by becoming an Army medic - and an exceptionally good one - in the British Army years ago. He'd served several tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq by the time Fate and just shoddy luck landed him with a wound from an exploding IED bad enough to immediately necessitate his honourable discharge. After recovering physically, he was sent back to England to recover mentally and emotionally, given a tiny bedsit and a pat on the back by the government, and basically shoved out into the great cesspool of London to otherwise fend for himself.

Four weeks back, he was running short on funds and patience, with his own inability to find purpose in life fueling a sudden desperate bid to find a niche in a world he had left behind as a civilian over a decade before. The unpredictable tremor in his dominant hand made certain he could not apply for and would not be accepted as a surgeon in medical circles, and while his qualifications were certainly above average, his physical appearance was less than intimidating at present, given that he was still fighting off the horrors of war and the handicaps from said war.

Oddly enough, it was a chance encounter with an amiable busybody that set his feet on the path to purpose. Mike Stamford was a genial, harmless, but quietly intelligent man he vaguely remembered from his medical school days, and after a coincidental meeting in St. James's Park one day he began to occasionally meet up with Mike and a few of his friends for a pub night once a week. It was barely a fortnight later that his new acquaintance dropped the bombshell, John's war-honed gallows humour mentally supplied the pun.

"Not looking for a job just yet by any chance, are you John?" Mike questioned over their latest round.

John looked up quickly, and spoke above a sudden burst of noise from a raucous table to their left. "Doing what?"

"Police coroner, actually." Mike swigged the remainder of his drink and plunked the glass back on the bar. "I've a friend at Bart's morgue who's occasionally in touch with the boys at Scotland Yard on the odd case or two. Said their primary coroner is getting ready to retire and they're looking for a replacement. Just thought of you, is all. Don't need a steady hand for a y-incision, now do you?"

Pleased that he was being treated with matter-of-factness rather than pity, John smiled, a bit ruefully. "Don't civil servant positions usually hire from the inside?" he asked.

"No idea." Mike shrugged easily. "But I can introduce you to Molly, she can probably give you more details. Can't hurt to look into it, at least; God knows your CV is certainly up to snuff for it, and even if it's a total wash the benefits have to be worth the job, eh?"

It was a thought, certainly, and John nodded before the conversation drifted into other channels. The next day, he met Miss Molly Hooper, who gave him an email address of a department head at the New Scotland Yard. On a whim, he submitted his application and qualifications, citing his referral and references, and thought no more about it until later that week, when he received a reply telling him to report to the NSY for an interview.

He was not much of a believer in Fate, because it had done a crap job on his life lately, but someone had to be smiling upon him for he landed the job with a minimal amount of fuss. The fact that his interviewer had a son in Iraq and a daughter in Afghanistan probably had something to do with it, though he would never use his service as a crutch or leverage to land himself special privileges. Either way, within the week John Watson found himself installed as a police coroner, on what looked to be a nearly full-time basis.

As a little boy he'd always been fascinated by police dramas, and so he found himself enjoying his job rather well as the first few days passed. He had little trouble with the people he encountered in his work, cloistered away as he was in a police morgue, and found himself out of sheer curiosity fine-tuning his observational skills, testing them on the people who came in and out of his domain.

There was Detective Inspector Dimmock, who appeared to be a decent sort, if a bit dim at times (John wondered how he could mistake the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning for arsenic poisoning, but he supposed every man has his own specialities). He was usually shadowed by a psychological profiler named Hopkins, an enterprising young man with an obvious aim of making Detective Inspector as fast as he could claw his way to the top. There was a Sergeant Anderson, who was an absolute genius at what he did in forensics but had all the personality of a doorknob, and a young biometrics assistant named Morse who was obviously just out of uni and still full of wide-eyed wonder at the newness of his job. John's personal favourite was a polite, genial DI named Lestrade, for the man appeared to both have a brain in his head but also be able to take John's opinions into account when the coroner's instincts differed from an established hypothesis. Lestrade was a good sort, and John wondered why he hadn't been promoted long before now, judging by his age and competence. Probably a bit of a rule-bender, he surmised with interest, and as such had to work harder despite delivering better results.

His life had narrowed a bit after three months of his new employment, to encompass little more than his work and his half-hearted attempt at blogging (there were only so many autopsies he could write about before he started losing already scant readership). Still, he persevered under his well-meaning therapist's advice, and began branching out a bit; occasionally going to a museum, attending the odd pub quiz, and even attempting to have a monthly lunch date with Harry (his sister was suspicious of his motives, but would not turn down a free luncheon as well as the chance to affectionately interrogate her baby brother). It was a less-than-spectacular existence, but it paid the bills and kept him out of the mental hospitals and off the antidepressants - which was an improvement upon many of his fellow veterans, and so he could hardly complain.

Yes, John's life, whilst uneventful, was still a sight better than it had been - but there still existed that yawing chasm of utter mundane mediocrity which threatened to swallow his adrenaline-craving nature in its maw.

Until one evening, everything changed.

He had been working with DI Lestrade on a bizarre murder case (he was leaning toward ritual execution, though Lestrade had dismissed his theory as too melodramatic when there was no real evidence other than the neatness of the killing to suggest it), and was wrapping up an unrelated post-mortem one night when he received results back from the labs on the contents of Lestrade's murder victim's digestive tract.

Somehow, he rather thought the DI would think differently about it being an execution, when he learned that a piece of microfilm was discovered in the dead man's stomach.

He was so elated at his discovery (so much more interesting than just the dead man's last meal!) that he was taken entirely by surprise when the lights to the lab were cut, plunging him into the sickly red glare of emergency lighting. However, John Watson was a soldier, and a good one; he had more than recovered by the time three men in black entered the morgue, pulling weapons as they did.

John had learnt long ago that however sacrilegious it might seem, a dead body was quite an effective shield and preferable to stopping a bullet one's self; the unfortunate drowning victim he'd just finished dissecting served to stop the projectile that sped toward him from the first man's gun. He heard a short pop, indicating either a silencer or that it was an anaesthetic dart rather than a bullet, which was just _lovely_ as it would not bring anyone in at the sound of gunshots.

Well, then, he could always do it the hard way.

Heaving the corpse onto the first oncomer was harder than it sounded, though he managed well enough, and then he ducked behind the autopsy table and came up swinging with a drill blade, just in time to deflect the second man's aim and ram the blade into his stomach, followed by a kick to the side of the knee and a knockout punch to the jaw as the man dropped with a shout of pain. He dropped and rolled as instincts screamed a warning, hearing something ping off the drawer above him, and swept a leg under the next man's legs, following up with a wrench of the man's arm, popping it out of socket with ease. The gun skittered across the floor and he dove for it, hauling it upright and in one smooth motion flicking off the safety and firing its contents at the last gunman, who was rifling through the lab's test results. The man didn't drop, confirming John's suspicion that it was a dart gun, and he wasn't going to shoot a double dose of an unidentified drug at a man who had not tried to kill him outright.

That did not, however, stop him from chopping the back of the man's neck and watching impassively as he slid to the floor.

The doors burst open at this juncture, followed by a gleam of powerful searchlights as a squad of officers stormed the room, headed by a wild-eyed Greg Lestrade.

"I rather think I was right about it being a ritual execution," John drawled, indicating the third gunman who was moaning on the floor, clutching the bag containing the microfilm.

Lestrade's eyes (and those of his men) bulged out of his head at the state of the room and John's attackers. He gave a long, low whistle. "Are they still alive, then?" he asked, glancing at the man clutching the drill blade in his stomach. "Just got word from MI-6 that this guy's a wanted spy and he has probably a dozen people after that film."

"I would never have guessed," John replied dryly, beginning triage on his attackers and directing a white-faced morgue assistant to apologetically restore the body he'd been autopsying back onto its table.

Lestrade took him out for a drink after they finished for the day, and he felt the beginnings of a tentative friendship form, one born of mutual respect and appreciation for the work. John returned to his bedsit that night slightly low on adrenaline, but feeling better than he had in _ages_.

* * *

Across London, Mycroft Holmes slowly lowered a sheaf of papers to his immaculate desk, and steepled his fingers pensively in front of his lips.

_Yes, John Watson, _he thought. _You will do very nicely indeed._


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

Unfortunately for John, after that spectacularly exciting evening in NSY's police morgue, his life returned to the basic, everyday routine he was beginning to loathe as much as his own inability to find suitable lodgings not reminiscent of a barracks. Lestrade, who had returned John's friendly offer in turn and asked John to call him Greg, had taken a strange sort of interest in him meanwhile, and had taken to dropping in of an evening or luncheon to bounce ideas off him about various cases. It was no uncommon occurrence for an official to discover the two in the morgue after most of the day shift had left, discussing oddities in the bodies John was autopsying, or exchanging ideas about Greg's latest case.

One such evening, John was finishing up with a post-mortem, securing the body and finishing paperwork, while Greg waited patiently for him to finish so that they could make a run for Thai takeaway before the DI had to go to a stakeout in Brixton.

"Anything in particular on, besides this drugs bust tonight?" John asked companionably, as he washed his hands.

Lestrade looked rather absent, he had noticed from the time the man had entered, and he blinked a couple of times before shrugging. "Nothing much, really, John."

"Mm." John shut the morgue drawer, glad of the finality, and turned around. "Want to tell me about it over that takeaway, then?"

Greg chuckled ruefully. "I suppose it might do me good to get an outside opinion, unofficial though it might be. There is something on my mind, John. It's a bit odd, more so than the usual." (1)

"Oh? How so?"

"Missing persons and robbery case. Except in each instance, the person disappeared literally, from a locked and bolted home or room, without a trace."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing, John. In each case, nothing in the room has been disturbed, and there are no signs whatsoever of violence. Had the boys going over each room with a fine-toothed comb and we've turned up nothing." Lestrade sighed. "It's like something out of a Christie novel."

"Were the victims related in any way?"

"Not that I've been able to discover. Apparently they're all model citizens, at least according to their lack of criminal record."

John raised an eyebrow as he tossed his soiled lab coat down the laundry chute and retrieved his cane. "Got yourself in a bad spot there, then. How'd your division land those?"

"Rotten luck, I suppose." Lestrade grimaced. Holding the door for John, he shook his head. "I've got no explanations for anyone, and neither does Anderson. How they expect me to perform miracles and find missing people when there's not a trace to follow is beyond me."

"And nothing else was missing from the rooms?" John asked, his interest piqued now.

"Well, not that we can tell. Two of the three lived alone, and there was no sign of anything being disturbed but we scarcely have a full catalogue of belongings. One had a mistress who was in the house the night the gent disappeared, but he vanished from a locked study without a trace. She swears something is missing from his desk but as she only saw it a few times she can't give us any idea what it was."

John knew better, and thought better of Lestrade's team, than to ask if there were suspicious dust rings or something on the desk. He shook his head. "Definitely a puzzle. Afraid I can't really help you there," he said ruefully. "Wish I could; it sounds like a case that would make an amazing story." The boys at the NSY had found out a few weeks back that he kept a blog, and that he was one of those rare people who actually _liked_ to write - and now they teased him mercilessly about writing the great Crime Novel of the century.

Lestrade shared a grin with him. "I'll be sure to leak the details to you when I solve it, and you can name a character after me, shall I?"

They shared a quick takeaway in Lestrade's office before the DI apologetically headed out with Sgt. Donovan for his stakeout/hopefully soon-to-be drugs bust. John handed over his autopsy report to his superior before leaving for the evening, and headed reluctantly out into the blustery weather with a slight expression of distaste and a heartfelt wish that he could somehow rid himself of his psychosomatic limp (or land a job with high enough wages he could afford to take a cab home). It was highly inconvenient, not to mention embarrassing, because he knew it was not real but that nonetheless did not negate the very real pain. In addition, he hated being pitied, and everyone shoots a cripple pitying looks without even meaning to.

Rain poured off the rooftops in sheets, and he was soaked long before he'd made it four streets away. Too brisk of a wind to use his umbrella, and his well-worn secondhand coat did little to keep out such inclement weather. He made a mental note to drink more juice for the next few days and pick up a packet of Vitamin C drops at Boots before coming in to work tomorrow. Pausing at a crosswalk, he watched in absent amusement as a gentleman trying to hold a newspaper over his head suddenly scurried after it when the wind ripped it off, sending it scuttling soggily down the street.

He was just passing a phone booth when...the phone inside it began to ring.

Cocking his head, he stared at the booth with well-deserved trepidation. It was like something that only happened in crap horror movies, and the street was nearly deserted, the more intelligent populace having taken shelter indoors. He hurried onward, shaking his head.

And then the next booth rang as well.

And the next.

And then the street lamps on both sides of him went out suddenly, leaving him silhouetted against a brightly-lit launderette window. He wisely ducked into the shadow of an awning, well out of a potential crossfire on pure instinct, but in the process fetched up against another phone booth.

This phone rang. And rang. And continued ringing as he watched, incredulous.

Finally, as a slosh of water drenched what little bit of dry he'd been protecting within his coat, he shrugged and entered the booth; because obviously someone wanted his attention, and if they could do this they could use cruder methods of getting it. Besides, they were following a man who had smuggled an illegal firearm back from military service; there were very few things he was truly afraid of at this point.

He picked up the receiver and held it to his ear, making sure to look warily through the small glass panes of the booth for anyone approaching, but said nothing.

And, as it turned out, he did not need to.

* * *

Mysterious black cars with tinted windows, deserted warehouses with leaking pipes, secret rendezvous with designer-suited gentlemen under cover of secrecy - it obviously was his week for being thrown unceremoniously into bizarre situations.

"You don't appear very afraid," observed the man he'd been taken (mostly) against his will to meet.

"You don't appear very frightening," he replied dryly, and saw a muscle twitch in the man's cheek. (2)

"Is there nothing you are afraid of, Doctor Watson?"

"Dying of boredom, possibly." He glanced at his mobile, noting the time (they'd driven about fifteen minutes in a southerly direction). "Would you mind getting to the point? You do have one, I presume."

"I have always held we do not truly compensate our military servicemen upon their return to civilian life, not properly anyway. Would you agree with that opinion, Captain Watson?"

He stiffened, left hand clenched against his trouser seam. So they were to be playing it that way, were they? "Have you researched me, or are you simply a lucky guesser?" he asked.

"I never guess. It is a shocking habit. (3) No, you are Captain John Hamish Watson, late of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, part of the Helmand province campaign - I trust you do not require a revisiting of the specifics - wounded in an IED explosion, managed to save the life of the driver of the vehicle despite both legs being trapped under the wreckage, by applying a tourniquet to the man's badly wounded arm and turning him into the recovery position so he did not asphyxiate on his own vomit. You never received recognition for this act of valour, primarily because the other occupants of the vehicle were unconscious or deceased at the time and the driver only barely recovered, months after you had been sent back to England." (4)

John swallowed, for his leg well remembered the trauma of being able to hear exactly who in that vehicle was alive and who was dying; hence the limp. He had been unable to reach anyone other than the driver, trapped as he was and with a piece of shrapnel embedded in his shoulder frighteningly close to the subclavian artery. (5)

His tormentor was not finished. "Prior to this your last tour, you served two terms in Afghanistan and one in Iraq with the Queen's Dragoon Guards (6), proving yourself to be superior in your skills as a surgeon and a trained combat soldier. Turned down an offer five years ago to become an army sniper, as it violated your moral principles at the time." Light grey eyes peered at him over the small Moleskine. "Has that admirable but foolish sense of morality changed, I wonder."

"I could be persuaded to make an exception in your case," John snapped through his teeth.

The man smiled, as if thoroughly satisfied, and John cursed himself for reacting. That was a primary principle of conflict; never show your enemy your true feelings.

"But I digress." The small notebook was returned to the man's expensive suit coat pocket. "To return to my original point, Captain Watson. We as a rule do a poor job by our military when they return to civilian life, do we not?" John remained silent, but the man ignored his lack of participation. "I should, in your case, like to rectify that if we can come to an agreement."

"What sort of agreement?"

"I...well, shall we say, I represent a certain branch of our government and defence forces, and, in fact, would like to make a proposal to you. Nothing more."

"You expect me to believe you work for MI-6 or the Secret Service and are offering me a job?" John asked incredulously. He cast a glance at their surroundings. "Well, that at least explains the camp Bond atmosphere," he added, rolling his eyes.

"You may believe whatever you like, Doctor Watson. The fact remains, that I have a job for you, should you choose to accept it."

"And if I do, I gain...?"

"A substantial sum of money as payment, for one thing," the man said, with a careless swing of umbrella. "But, more importantly," he added, spinning to pierce John with a knowing look, "you have an assignment and a purpose which I can guarantee you will appeal more to your, shall we say, adrenaline-dependent living tendencies than dissecting corpses in New Scotland Yard's morgue?"

John flushed angrily, but this time kept his mouth shut; there was no reason to give the man any more ammunition. And besides, he was now quite curious. "What sort of assignment are we talking about?" he asked bluntly.

"Nothing which will outrage your moral sensibilities, John. No assassinations or espionage against the Realm or the like. Though I can give you a license to kill if you would prefer...it does make the legal red tape so much easier if you are caught with that illegal Army Browning in your possession, you know." A knowing smile as John's eyes flickered uneasily. "But as far as your assignment, I have a gentleman I would like located and surveillance put upon. You would merely perform that duty and report to me. Nothing more, nothing less."

John was silent for a moment, weighing his opponent. Then, "I've always held with the adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is," he remarked candidly. "This smacks of politics, and I refuse to become nothing more than a pawn in a game where I don't know the rules."

"I had anticipated you would say as much," the man replied, apparently unruffled. "Shall I give you some time to consider the matter, then? Say, two days? I will not force you into any assignment, Captain," he continued, looking down an aquiline nose. "I have never found those men who must be blackmailed into service to be trustworthy. Should you accept your assignment, my assistant will give you a number where I can be reached by call or text." John briefly repressed a giggle at the idea of a government official doing something so mundane as text messaging. "The assignment is somewhat urgent, however, as matters are fast coming to a head - but those details can wait until you have the proper clearance. You understand, of course." The bland smile was back in place, and John recognized the dismissal for what it was.

"...Right, then," he said, a trifle awkwardly, and shifted his weight onto his good leg to begin his walk back to the car. "I'll be in touch, yeah?"

"Choose wisely, Captain Watson," his opponent called calmly after him. "You will find that you have hardly left the battlefield, and the side you choose can have...unexpected consequences."

"...Sure." He shook his head, and scrambled into the back seat of the Mercedes opposite the man's extraordinarily pretty (and totally not interested, unfortunately) assistant.

"I'm to take you home," she said, without looking up from her mobile phone.

John shrugged easily and gave her the address, deciding to enjoy not having to walk back to his bedsit in the deluge that buffeted the vehicle.

At the very least, it was not a wasted evening.

* * *

Lestrade was distracted the following day, barely giving John a nod when he brought an autopsy report on a poisoning case by the DI's office.

"Another one last night," he groaned in response to John's candid observation that he looked like something off _Dawn of the Dead_.

"Locked-room disappearance?"

"Yeah. This time it was a middle-aged woman, which is new, but I don't see a significant clue other than that. Oh, and that she was one of those nutters that collects cheap knick-knacks. Every solid surface in the house, covered in the things. Creepy dolls and smiling cats and dancing bears and the like." Lestrade gave a full-body shudder that made John grin knowingly. "Every. Square. Inch. If something _were _stolen we'd never be able to tell."

"Unless she didn't dust the things properly, which is fairly common with that type. Dust is eloquent, Greg," John said thoughtfully. "Have you double checked, just to be sure? No valuable antiques that she didn't realise she owned, that could be a motive for kidnapping?"

"Got Anderson's crew finishing up the photographs right now, but I didn't see anything at a quick look-through. Bloody unnatural, if y'ask me, all those eyes staring at you everywhere you turn. Wouldn't sleep a wink in that house, I tell you."

John nodded. "Had a maiden aunt who collected angels; I was always scared to death to sleep in the guest bedroom, all those benevolent smiles staring down at me as a kid..."

A knock at the door heralded the arrival of a sergeant with Anderson's photographs, and Lestrade peered wearily into the folder, shuffling through them with the expertise of a man who has done this more times than he can count and really doesn't expect to find anything.

"Mm, as I thought. Would be a bit too much to ask -"

"Hold up, what was that?"

"What was what?"

John picked a photograph out of the discarded stack and held it up. "Just there - isn't that a circular spot that's a bit off-colour from the rest? Could be a place where a figurine or something was standing."

The DI peered eagerly at the photo, and then looked up, grinning triumphantly. "You may be right! But we have no way of finding out what exactly it was, do we."

"Not really, unless she has someone, a friend or someone, who might know what was sitting there. Cleaning service?"

"On it. Keep your fingers crossed," Lestrade replied, already on his phone to one of his minions to begin research.

"Mmhm. Lunch later?"

"Got a meeting with the CS, unfortunately. Catch you later."

John nodded and headed down to the morgue, nodding to colleagues as he passed them in the corridors. He was just about to go out of phone range in the elevator down when his mobile beeped.

_Have you considered my offer any further, Captain?_

There was no signature or name, but he recognized the number. Mr. X was persistent, he'd give him that.

He probably should not have gotten that much enjoyment from ignoring the text, but he put the weirdness which was his life from his mind while he set to work.

* * *

Late that evening, he arrived back at his bedsit exhausted and dripping wet. Obviously Mother Nature had decided she would like to try to drown the British Isles, and she was doing a rather good job of it. He hung his jacket and other clothing near the heating vent to dry, and changed into the few comfortable clothes he owned.

Forgotten in his trouser pocket, his mobile beeped again.

_You do understand that accepting my offer will ensure you will never again need to fight your way across Montague Street in a pouring gale, do you not?_

Obviously the man was a stalker as well as whatever else he did for a living. John sent him back a Farsi vulgarity and went for a hot shower. When he returned, another message was waiting.

_Charming. My assistant will be delivering you your assignment information this evening; review it and get back with me re: its contents, if you will._

As if to underscore the message, his buzzer rang to indicate the young woman standing under an expensive umbrella on his doorstep downstairs. She ignored his offer to come in with polite indifference, handed him a dossier, and left a moment later. The clack of designer heels followed her down the corridor to the elevator as John shut the door behind her.

He tossed the dossier onto the table and fixed himself a pot noodle before sitting down before it armed with his laptop and the newspaper Greg had handed him before he left, knowing John wasn't about to buy such extras with his small salary. That was part of the reason he liked the DI so much; Lestrade's knowledge of people obviously had been a benefit to his work as a police inspector, and that lack of pity but helpful matter-of-factness carried over into his personal relationships.

The mysterious disappearances had been relegated to Page Six, retreating under an article about a gas explosion on the South Side which had blown up a condemned warehouse, and some bizarre little piece about UFOs seen in the vicinity of Cardiff last weekend. John shook his head at the eyewitness's less-than-sound account of strange lights, shockwaves, and memory-altering drugs, and scanned the disappearances article. Nothing new there, other than the journalist's sensational account of a mysterious force slowly picking off innocent London residents one by one, etc., etc.

He reluctantly turned his attention toward the dossier he'd been forced into taking, in the hopes that it would prove less melodramatic and more realistic.

How wrong he was.

* * *

Mycroft Holmes had just checked in with his security detail and was preparing to retire for the night when his mobile beeped.

_Are you having me on?_  
JW

Smirking, he ignored the text and went to bed.

* * *

(1) Dialogue adapted from 6NAP (as indeed much of the backstory case will be)  
(2) Dialogue taken from ASIP, and the following conversation twisted to fit my purposes  
(3) Said by the younger Holmes in SIGN  
(4) John wears the regimental tie of the Queen's Dragoon Guards in TGG, and in HOUN he's disclosed as being part of the Fifth Northumberland, as was Dr. Watson in ACD canon.  
(5) There's no set canon as to how John was injured in BBC's version of events, and so I went with ACD canon details regarding the injury and simply used a feasible explanation for the event.  
(6) See 4


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

The next day, John was swamped with an intricate autopsy on a corpse that apparently was the third in a string of similar suicides. Poisoning was suspected based upon an empty pill bottle found with each victim, and each suicide appeared to be inexplicable in that the victims had displayed no tendencies toward depression and had no business being in the locations where their bodies were found.

"I would be willing to spot you a month's rent if you could give me a clue here, John," Lestrade's dismal voice carried through the room over the sound of John's computer printing out the results of the autopsy.

"How's that, Greg?"

"Well, they appear to be suicides, but who ever heard of suicide being contagious?"

"They're linked, you mean," John supplied, snatching the papers from the printer. "It is a bit much to be coincidence. Murder, then? Administered by force?"

"You think it possible?"

"Not physically by force, at any rate. No signs of violence on the body whatsoever, and while there was considerable alcohol in the blood and stomach not even a drunk woman would self-administer poison in the same manner as two other people in recent weeks," John answered, reading over his findings. He frowned in contemplation, while Lestrade slumped into a chair. "You are certain there's no link between the three victims other than methodology and the poison used?"

"None that we've been able to find. It's a real puzzler, honestly." The DI sighed dramatically, and ran a hand through his greying hair. "The press is having a field day with it - you should have seen the conference this morning."

John made a sympathetic _tsk_ in the back of his throat. Flipping to the medical information about the poison, he scanned the papers briefly and then handed them over with a shrug. "I honestly can't tell you more than your previous coroner could on the first two bodies, if the reports are any indication."

"Anything that struck you as out of the ordinary?" Lestrade asked desperately. "Anything at all?"

"Besides the fact that I've never actually seen a botulism poisoning outside of medical school? (1) Whoever your former coroner was, points to him for discovering something that obscure because I wouldn't have thought to check for it." His brow furrowed in thought. "Mm. Poison suicides are a favoured choice, especially among women - less traumatic mentally than a bullet to the brain, for example, and takes less internal fortitude to administer - but there was no hypodermic mark on the body." John frowned. "Botulism poisoning is actually quite clever, because even a tiny dosage - a millionth of a gram, even that small - is enough to kill an average adult in seconds. There's no reason, however, that it would even be put into pill form, and absolutely no possibility that the three victims made the pills themselves; they wouldn't be able to get hold of it and manufacture the pills."

Lestrade perked up with interest. "That makes sense...so they must have a supplier, then? Is that the link, you think? Are we looking for a shady physician?"

John shook his head, frowning. "Well, it would be fairly easy for the right kind of doctor to lay his hands on and administer _clostridium botulinum_," he mused aloud. "But your records would show if they all frequented the same physician, wouldn't they?"

Deflating with a sigh, Lestrade nodded. "Yeah, and we've not discovered anything of the kind. No leads whatsoever. Also it still doesn't explain why they all voluntarily took poison with no signs of any sort of struggle...not to mention that you didn't find any puncture wounds on the bodies and like you said, pills of the stuff would be hard to come by..."

John tapped a finger against his lips, before venturing with a bit of hesitation, "The only other thing which could possibly be of interest to you, Inspector, is the fact that botulism is one of the few toxins to which there is actually a vaccine - you can make yourself immune to it. That's all I can tell you, I'm afraid." (2)

"So basically we know they weren't immune. Helpful, that," Lestrade teased him as he got up.

John grinned good-naturedly. "Well, you know. Investigative intuition isn't my division. Speaking of, how is your mysterious vanishing-out-of-thin-air case going?"

"Nowhere fast," Lestrade sighed. "Still haven't been able to turn up any leads, though I've got a call in to the last victim's cleaning company so maybe a maid will remember what's been taken from the room. Other than that, nothing."

"Well, I have to say I am intrigued, Inspector." John blushed lightly. "If you need a police surgeon on the scene for some reason if there's another victim -"

"Still scouting proper material for that novel of the century, eh." Lestrade laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "I'll see what I can do. Least I owe you for how neatly you've slid in to fill the gap old Algy left when he retired. The place has never run this efficiently. Military influence has done us all good, y'know?"

John was rather pleased at the rare praise; there was no glory in the job, really, and while he was grateful for the opportunity to do something with his abilities besides prescribe antibiotics for sick children at a charity clinic, occasionally he wished for something with a bit more excitement. Having a ranking police inspector on his side, besides the fact that Greg was a good friend, couldn't do anything but help him in the politics that came with this business.

Lestrade paused by the door, papers in hand. "Let me know if you've any ideas, will you John? No matter how strange, we'll take anything at this point."

John gave him a cursory nod, already moving on to file the autopsy paperwork. He had volunteered to cover the midnight shift tonight, and wanted to make certain he could run back to his flat for a few hours to catch a nap and a bite to eat before returning to the boring night ahead. Lestrade dropped in once more, just as he was preparing to leave, to tell him that a fourth breaking-and-entering had occurred with yet another mysterious disappearance, but that once again they had no clues as to the perpetrator.

Lestrade offered to come back later that night to go over the cases again and keep him company through the more relaxed evening shift, but John waved him off, knowing the DI's wife would not be happy that he was not at home on a rainy night.

Besides, John needed privacy to begin research into his mysterious second employer.

He returned to his small office late that evening, and after determining his priority list for the night was low decided to spend his time thinking about his prospective mission. Something just sounded a bit off to him about the whole affair, and his instincts were screaming at him to be extremely careful - that he was playing with enemy fire, and could easily become a casualty. At the same time, he could not distinguish a particular reason why he felt this way, as his employer had not asked him to perform any duty which technically violated his sense of ethics. It was a conundrum, certainly, and while he was appreciative of the opportunity and excitement, he was also far too wary of gift horses. His therapist insisted he had trust issues, and while he believed she was mistaken about the depth of his PTSD, for one, he was inclined to agree with her first assessment.

Finally frustrated with his own uncertainty, he turned to his computer and booted up a private browsing session.

A cursory scour of the internet using key words from the file turned up more conspiracy theories than he could get through in a century, and he stopped after an hour in frustration. However, the little voice in the back of his mind which fuelled his scepticism and analytical nature piped up, informing him that he had found nothing which would prove that the contents of Mr. X's files were inaccurate. The absence of proof did not negate truth, and he was a bit uneasy that he had not easily discounted the fanciful tale with a bit of research - rather the opposite; there were actually corroborating and completely unrelated accounts. No matter how far-fetched they were, they did all agree, which was unusual for an elaborate hoax. What clinched his doubts, however, was the fact that he had more than once stumbled upon web pages which suddenly shut down on him, or which popped up as blocked access. And who would bother to block internet pages - and why? - about these things unless there was indeed information which the public was not to know?

Was it really possible that he had stepped straight into something that sounded suspiciously like a science-fiction television program?

Frowning, he turned back to the browsing session, and in desperation typed in _The Doctor Torchwood Blue Box Aliens Classified Tardis Sightings_. He pressed the Enter key and waited.

And his computer shut down completely, making a dismal popping noise before going silent.

Despite all his swearing and unplugging/plugging, no amount of trying could get it to turn on again. After two hours and a squad from IT trying to fix it without success, John was beginning to think perhaps his mysterious Mr. X was more dangerous than he had at first sized him up to be.

Also, now he was going to have to fill out the requisitional paperwork and explain why he needed a new computer after only a short time on the job.

Could his week possibly get any worse?

* * *

Mycroft Holmes's mobile chirped as he sat down for a tea break between his last two appointments of the day.

_You and your internet security protocols owe me a new computer. Make it a new Mac and I might consider your offer._  
JW

His secretary Wilkins popped in a moment later, horrified that his staid employer was doing something so utterly improper as _laughing aloud_ in a government office.

* * *

(1) ASIP never specified the poison used in the episode, and with the invaluable aid of** Pompey**'s medical research I chose this as both a feasible explanation as well as a nod to TGG, in which botulism poisoning is again used by Moriarty.  
(2) I have to admit I'm of the camp of ASIP-watchers who has also seen _The Princess Bride_; I believe that both pills were poison and the cabbie vaccinated against the toxin, rather than just one pill as poison, but that's just my opinion.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

"John? Oi, John!"

"In here," he called from the back room, where he was placing instruments in a sanitizing pan.

Lestrade stuck his head round the door frame. "What's this I hear about you crashing a computer? The boys all joke about you typing with two fingers but I didn't peg you for a man who's stupid enough to click on a popup and download malware."

John barked a short laugh, well aware of his own technological handicaps. "I swear I didn't do anything to the ruddy piece of junk," he said over the noise.

"Well, it's a good job you did, if you get a replacement like that," Lestrade said with a bit of obvious envy.

"How's that?" John asked absently, placing the pan on the counter.

"Your new one," Lestrade repeated. He jerked a thumb backward over one shoulder. "'S a beauty, mate. How you finagled that out of the Powers That Be I've no idea, but can you teach a bloke your skills?"

John stared at him blankly, and then pushed past his grinning friend to see a brand-new, very recent model sitting on his previously empty desk.

"Er..." While he was fumbling to explain the sudden and fairly disturbing appearance, his mobile beeped.

_I believe in rewarding healthy caution, Captain. My assistant will pick you up from NSY at precisely 5:10 this evening, should you have made your decision by then._

He didn't like the idea of being beholden to someone, but only an idiot decides his pride is more important than his pocketbook. He sighed and replaced the phone in the pocket of his scrubs.

Lestrade was staring at him curiously. "Something I need to know about?" he asked shrewdly.

"I'd prefer you didn't ask."

"That bad, eh."

"More like that complicated."

"Anything shady?"

"Certainly not!" he retorted indignantly. "I've no desire to jeopardize a secure job with prospects!"

"Well, that's all right then," Lestrade replied cheerfully. "Now, if you've quite done with the drooling over your new tech, I've got fifteen minutes before I meet Donovan to look over the Braxton murder case - and we've got something new on this string of mysterious disappearances I thought you might be interested in."

John had blushed and hastily backed away from his new toy as the DI spoke, and now tossed his jacket over the back of his desk chair, leaving his arms free to inspect the file he'd been handed.

"Are you supposed to be showing me this?" he asked absently, flipping through a police report.

"Not technically, I suppose, but because it's a breaking-and-entering, it puts it in the department of possible intent to do harm, so I can stretch things a bit if I need to, to include your opinion as the primary official coroner on any suspected violence or homicide."

"So it was a break-in this time? Not a mysterious disappearance?"

Lestrade nodded.

"How on earth d'you know the break-in is connected to the disappearances, then?" he inquired, moving on to a series of crime scene photographs.

"Because the house that's been burgled is _the second victim's_," the DI explained, eyes glinting with sharp interest. "How he got past the police tape without being seen by the CCTV or by the gossipy shrews who live on both sides is beyond me - but the door was standing open this morning and there are signs of an intruder all over the place."

"Not just a case of chance vandalism or burglary, I suppose," John mused, seeing that the expensive television and video console were still in place in the house's lounge, as well as the jewellery case in the master bedroom.

"Why was nothing taken, if it was? It really is a mystery," Lestrade sighed. "Wish I could make head or tail of it, John, really I do. Why break into a house where a man disappeared but steal nothing?"

"And you're quite certain it was broken into?" John asked curiously, squinting at a photograph. "Looks to me like the door was just unlocked; no signs of forced entry unless the photograph isn't picking them up..."

"That's another odd bit," his companion agreed. "There are no signs of forced entry, but the door was locked with a dead-bolt; we used the victim's keys to do it ourselves the night before, after we secured the area and padlocked the murder room."

John's eyebrows inched upward. "Someone obviously has a duplicate key, then. Friend? Boyfriend? Family member? Maybe someone coming to take something before the will is read? It's not un-heard of in bereavements."

"I would be inclined to agree with you, especially since nothing of value was stolen," Lestrade said slowly.

"But...?"

"But take a look at this." A paper was handed over, and John glanced down the sheet. "It's a report from Anderson's forensics team. Fingerprints taken right after the disappearance only showed the deceased and a family member - several days old, and we cleared him right off - inside. This morning, Anderson found a partial set on the study door and another partial on the desk in the study."

"Any matches?"

"Not a one."

"Well that only proves the burglar didn't have a record," John pointed out, glancing up from the paper. "That's hardly cause for you to show me -"

"Keep looking." Lestrade leaned over his shoulder and pointed down the report. "Routine DNA sampling from around the place this morning turned up some skin cells and a hair on that same desk that didn't belong to the vanished woman. And routine analysis turned up something very odd."

John read the lines of print, lips mouthing the words as he concentrated, and then his head jerked up in astonishment. "I assume you've checked to see this isn't a lab error?" Lestrade rolled his eyes. "Yes of course you have. Well, this is interesting."

"That's all you've got, interesting?" the DI exclaimed. "I show you a forensics report showing DNA structure unlike anything medical science has ever seen before and all you can say is 'well that's interesting'?"

"You want me to put it in my blog or something, Greg?"

Lestrade groaned into his hands. "John, you realise this means we're dealing with someone - something - that's probably some kind of genetic mutation?"

John surreptitiously slid the forensics report into a sheaf of paperwork on his desk, and substituted a post-mortem report in its place without Lestrade seeing him. "You had a Spiderman film night with Gregson recently, didn't you."

"John!"

"All right, all right." He backed away, hands upraised in a gesture of peace. "I admit it's beyond odd. But I've never seen anything like it; have you?" Lestrade's incredulous look was answer enough. "Your people, I mean. Surely you've got some biological expert on the force who specialises in odd cases?"

"Anytime we've had something pop up that sounds even remotely off, they always make us send it to labs in the country. I dunno who, but it's done through some sort of hush-hush agency. Some bigwig in Whitehall mandated it years ago, no one really knows why. All kinds of conspiracy theories about it, though."

"I'm sure," John murmured.

"Well, I've got to be off or Donovan will come looking for me," Lestrade sighed, stuffing the dossier back into the stack in his hand. "Just wanted to show you that - keep an eye out for anything odd in unidentified corpses the next few days, yeah?"

"Of course. Best of luck, by the way," John called after him. Lestrade waved and disappeared around the corner. John sat down at the desk and retrieved the paper he had nicked from the police reports.

Three days ago, he probably would have dismissed it as an anomaly, or at the least would not really have cared much about it. But in light of his new knowledge of something so secretive that security protocols a'la Her Majesty's Defence program would crash his computer for researching certain topics...

If this Doctor was indeed an alien that explained the genetic anomaly, and if the reports in Mr. X's files were true...there had been several instances documented over the decades of people disappearing in connection with this mysterious Doctor, whether chance victims or people suspected of being his 'Companions', so the files said. Some, like Ms. Rose Tyler, had supposedly died but bodies had never been found; and some, like one Mickey Smith, had vanished and then turned up several years later, refusing to explain where he had been.

After all, there was an old saying that when the impossible is ruled out, whatever remains has to be the truth - and as it was impossible for these people in Lestrade's disappearances to vanish literally without a trace by means known to man, then it therefore followed that there was an _outside _agency involved.

Either that was very sound logic, or very bad novel-writing.

"I'm turning into a right nutter, I am," he mumbled, as he quickly scanned the report and saved it to a portable thumb drive before putting it in an envelope to give back to Lestrade. "Next thing I'll be insisting I've been beamed up to the _Enterprise_ and back again."

It was time he got some answers, ones not shrouded in scepticism and doubt.

* * *

Mycroft Holmes's mobile rang was he was about to enter a neutral location for negotiations with a foreign potentate and the Ministry of Immigration.

_Bring me everything you've got on this Doctor, along with what you know of his former associates._  
JW


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

A nearby church clock was just striking the quarter-hour when John stepped out of the doors of New Scotland Yard, hoping that Mr. X's assistant would be tolerant of his tardiness. He could hardly control Athelney Jones's demanding a rush autopsy and poison analysis on a suspect barely an hour before John was scheduled to leave.

A black Mercedes pulled up beside him before he'd gone past the first Bus Loading zone, and upon seeing the familiar face of the gaunt driver (he was already mentally calling him Lurch) John slid into the back seat and was promptly ignored by the assistant, who was busily emailing on her mobile (or else playing a game, he wouldn't be at all surprised if the girl was addicted to Angry Birds or something equally incongruous).

He was shown into a deserted warehouse yet again, though this time it looked like his mysterious soon-to-be employer had had the decency to bring in a portable heater and a small table-and-chairs combination, complete with a tiny tea service. Curiouser and curiouser.

John leaned his cane against the table, nodded his appreciation, and accepted a cup of Earl Grey.

"I take it you have decided to accept my proposal," Mr. X began after the usual pleasantries were (a little stiffly) exchanged.

"On a few conditions."

"I anticipated as much. The first?"

"I'd like a name to put with your face, unless you'd like to be referred to as _Mulder_ indefinitely," he replied, the corner of his lips tugging in an ironic smirk.

The man gave a well-bred cringe at the reference. "That, I suppose, is fair enough. My name is Mycroft Holmes; it means nothing to you, I know. That is the secret of my power, and that is all you need to know, Captain."

John shrugged easily, and nodded in acceptance. "Mr. Holmes it is, then."

Mycroft smiled thinly, dangerously. "And your other conditions?"

"I want security clearance to perform basic research," he answered. "I'll not appreciate my computer blowing up in my face if I try to locate fanbases for this character to gauge public opinion, or my files being wiped if I should try to email one of his former associates."

Mycroft Holmes looked vaguely uneasy, but ultimately after a moment of consideration nodded slowly. "I suppose that could be arranged, to an extent. You understand my misgivings regarding our...subject, John. It is nothing personal against you; merely safety precautions for an entirely too curious public."

"Fair enough. I'll also need a guarantee that you'll cover my gun if I am forced to use it," he said bluntly. "You've my word I don't intend to except as a last resort."

A thin eyebrow inclined precariously over one sharp eye. "I have already taken the liberty of dealing with the proper paperwork for your weapon, Captain. Are there any other terms?"

"Just one," he answered, sipping his tea.

"And that is?"

"You can remove the rest of the bugs you planted in my flat. I've already destroyed the one you planted on me at our last meeting and the one in my landline," he said dryly. "I don't appreciate being stalked, Mr. Holmes, nor am I a fool."

A genuine grin twitched at Mycroft's lips. "I knew I had chosen well when you came to my attention. But will you even know if I remove all the devices from your charming little abode?"

"Probably not," John agreed, unperturbed. "But then will you know if the information I feed you is accurate?"

"Touché. I believe we can come to a mutually satisfying agreement, Doctor Watson. Shall we begin our discussion of your assignment, then?"

One hand casually in his pocket, John activated the short-term recording device he'd gotten one of the boys at the Yard to let him borrow for the evening. He knew better than to trust this man, and the first rule to survival in a war zone was to not play fair. If this blew up in his face, he would have verbal proof of his assignation but not of being a willing partner or of being a hired man.

"I am at your disposal, Mr. Holmes."

* * *

Nearly three hours later, John emerged from the elevator at his building, still reeling from the information they had discussed at length this evening. He could hardly be blamed, he thought, for his yet inability to fully wrap his human brain around the idea that there was an actual, honest-to-God _alien_ that had been running about unchecked in Britain for decades like some mischievous demi-god, showing up at odd times and wreaking havoc in his wake.

His initial reaction of scepticism had faded and then dissolved in the face of Mycroft Holmes's evidence of massive governmental cover-ups in both London and elsewhere in the British Isles when extra-terrestrial races had attempted invasion (for some odd reason, usually at Christmastime) of Earth. However, John was still a bit unclear as to why his mysterious employer wanted him to spy on, and ultimately bring in, this Doctor fellow - because if the stories were true, the man was indeed present at each instance but served the public safety by defending the Earth. Mycroft Holmes had been decidedly unclear as to why the Doctor was considered an enemy of the Crown rather than a rogue, but ultimately loyal, ally. True, there were many cold cases which dead-ended in his direction (the aforementioned Rose Tyler disappearance, for example), but no definite proof that the man had done anything which could be considered a threat to public safety or the Crown.

John had the sinking feeling he had just stepped back into a war zone, and that he wasn't quite clear whose side he should really be on.

Feeling a headache blossoming behind his eyes, he moaned aloud when his mobile chirped before he'd even got his door keys out.

_Our mysterious disappearance case turned to murder tonight. Like some overtime or shall I call in the relief coroner?_  
GL

He was in the lift faster than he would have thought possible with a bad leg, and was back in his office in the morgue in less than an hour.

"Thanks for coming back in, John," Lestrade sighed, running both hands through his increasingly dishevelled hair. "I'd prefer you over Philips this late at night, not to mention you've already a bit of interest in this one."

John bent over the body on the morgue table, snapping on a pair of gloves as he briskly set out instruments. "You said this is connected to your mysterious disappearances? How do you know that?"

"Oh, I forgot you left before the boys finally got a call back from the cleaning company. We've identified what's missing in the last victim's lounge."

John dropped a scalpel with a clang and looked up eagerly. "And?"

"According to one Maggie Coldwell," the DI began, checking himself against a small pocket notepad, "she was the regular maid who cleaned 'that bloody creepy house with the bloody creepy dolls and things'. Apparently Mrs. Coldwell is not a fan of ceramic animals and statuary," he added, glancing up with a smirk.

John grinned in response, and turned his attention back to the body after recording his initial observations (which were basically that no one could survive a severely broken neck).

"She remembers the contents of the desk because, and I quote, 'I ruddy ought to, seeing as I 'ad to dust it every bleedin' Friday morning, all those tiny little statues and the like.'" John made a non-committal sound of agreement as he set out the last tool. "Apparently the thing that's missing," Lestrade continued, "is just some stone statue of an angel the missing woman acquired sometime between Friday last and the day she disappeared. Mrs. Coldwell has no idea how the missing woman got it, just that it was sitting on the desk the Friday before."

"Stone statue? No possibility that it was valuable?"

"Not unless it's by a rare art master, which Mrs. Coldwell doubts. Said it was rather ugly, about two feet tall and made of grey stone, large wings, hands covering its eyes. Looked like 'somethin' you'd put in a ruddy garden like one o' those gnomes, not set on your desk in a private office.' Not attention-getting in any way, other than its general creepiness in the esteemed opinion of our cleaning lady."

John halted him for a moment, to narrate into his Dictaphone, and after finishing his initial observations motioned for the DI to continue.

"Right, so," John lifted the dead man's eyelids, made a note, and continued, "you think that whoever is responsible for the missing people, also stole a statue of an angel from the last victim?"

"And maybe the first two as well. What if they are valuable - what if whoever broke into the second victim's house was looking for a mate to the thing?" Lestrade hazarded. "I've seen stranger fixations and stranger things that were worth a tonne of money - just watch Antiques Roadshow and you see it happen every week. A full set is always more valuable than an odd piece."

"Mm, yes. But that doesn't explain how the people disappeared from locked rooms," John pointed out, extracting the dead man's stomach and heaving it into a basin for analysis.

Lestrade turned a bit green at the squelching noise. "No," he agreed reluctantly.

"Nor does it explain why you think this dead man is connected to the disappearances," John added, cocking an inquisitive eyebrow at his friend.

Lestrade grinned triumphantly. "Because we found him practically on the doorstep of a fourth house where the resident evidently vanished from a locked study."

"You're sure?"

"Quite. There's a live-in _au pair_ for the man's step-child, and it was she who heard the body fall outside and called the police. The gentleman of the house had been in the study reading when she went upstairs, and the room was locked on the inside along with the windows. We broke a French window to get into the study when we found the body on the front pavement."

John shook his head, eyes thoughtful. "Front door still locked?"

"No, oddly enough - it was unlocked." Lestrade's arm waved in a gesture of cluelessness. "Front door unlocked, study door locked, man vanished, dead man on the porch. And get this, John," he added, shaking his head. "This poor devil, as far as we know, is no relation to the missing man. Just a passer-by who happened to get his neck broken right outside the home of a bloke who's just gone missing from a locked room."

John examined the body's teeth with a small mirror, then moved to the nostrils. "Would make a good novel, rather," he mused with a hint of mischief, glancing over the man's face to his companion.

Lestrade grimaced. "I need everything you can give me without running a deep analysis; I have to go give a report and see if we can find out anything about the poor devil."

"Well, obviously he died of massive trauma to the second cervical vertebrae," John said decisively. "Snapped neck and severed spinal cord, death had to have been instantaneous. What I don't quite understand is the facial expression."

"What of it? He looks a bit unhappy, but he was about to get his neck snapped..."

"No, no," John shook his head, pointing to the man's eyes. "He wasn't just unhappy; he was scared petrified. So scared, in fact, that blood vessels have burst in his eyes and the whole of the facial muscles are locked in a rigor of terror. That's highly unusual in an instantaneous and therefore non-traumatic death. It's as if something frightened him badly just before he was killed - and somehow I doubt tripping on a rough pavement would do that to this extent."

Lestrade blinked, obviously taken aback.

"Then there's the method of execution," John continued, musing over the man's neck alignment. "This sort of clean break means one of two things."

"Which are?" Lestrade asked with interest.

"One, intensive training to kill with one's bare hands," he replied quietly. "Such as we receive in the military, or some similar self-defence program which tenets rely upon anatomical and nervous knowledge rather than on brute strength. I could do this, but your average fellow off the streets couldn't; that's why most people bent on murder use knives or other weapons."

Lestrade was scribbling furiously in his notepad. "And the second?"

"Less likely, but possible, especially given that we may be dealing with a...shall we say, genetic anomaly," he phrased delicately. "The second possibility is simply that it was done by a person possessing incredible, nearly superhuman physical strength. This man is at least ten stone; to produce a reaction of sheer terror and then snap a bloke's neck clean in two without having to use any other form of violence is no small accomplishment and can't be done by the average house-breaker, I shouldn't think."

"Lovely. It's shaping up to look like a poorly-done Monday night telly show, isn't it?" Lestrade sighed.

"Rather. Now off with you, if you want this done tonight; I can't dictate the autopsy with you nattering on in the background." John made a shooing motion with blood-spattered hands, and the DI jumped backward with a scowl.

"Well, if you get done in the next hour, hour and a half, I'll still be here. Swing by the office before you leave. Anderson ordered in Chinese and we've still plenty left, if you've not eaten."

John nodded absently, already engrossed in his work, and the inspector left, the doors swinging shut with a clang. An hour later, he was wrapping up the paperwork, very much enjoying his new computer, when the doors banged open once more and Lestrade barrelled in, looking rather frantic.

John's head jerked up. "You okay?" he asked with a look of concern.

"Ah...fine. But...well," the man swallowed, pinching the bridge of his nose with the fingers of one hand, "...you're probably going to think this is utterly mad, John."

He raised an eyebrow; if the man only knew. "What is?"

Lestrade pulled a sealed bag from his pocket, and sat heavily in the extra chair beside him. He removed a mobile phone from the bag and turned it on.

"This is the phone that belonged to our last victim there," he began, nodding at the table. "The boys just finished categorising his belongings and so on."

John's eyes lit up with excitement, already one step ahead of the inspector. "Did he get a photo of the house or his attacker, Lestrade?"

His companion looked up from the mobile, eyes shifting with unease. "So to speak," he muttered at last, as he scrolled through a folder. "But - well, see for yourself, John."

John took the phone as it was scooted across the desk toward him, and held it up to peer at the small screen.

"Bit hard to make it out, it's so blurry," he observed.

"Right. That's why I had the boys in the photo labs use their software to digitally enhance and clean up the image. They're wizards with cleaning up photographic evidence." Lestrade slowly removed an enlarged photograph from his dossier. "Take a look, John."

John cocked his head quizzically, searching for answers in the man's eyes as he took the proffered photo. Finally he looked down.

And dropped the picture as if it had burned his hand, yelping out a curse that sounded entirely too terrified for a man who had seen what he had.

"If it makes you feel better, I screamed like a schoolgirl," Lestrade mumbled with a wince.

"What - what is it?" John breathed at last, bending over the photo cautiously.

"I was rather hoping you could tell me," his companion said, a brittle edge to his voice. "Something tells me you know rather more about this whole mess than you're letting on, John. Are you working for someone?"

Well, it was a bit sooner than John had anticipated having this conversation, but then Lestrade did know him better than anyone else and he was brighter than the rest by a long stretch. "Not as a mole or a spy against you or anyone here at the Yard," he said calmly, for it was a perfectly reasonable demand. "Nor was I in anyone else's employ once I applied for this job. I've done nothing that can be categorised as illegal or treasonous in any way. Does that answer your initial concern?"

Lestrade's eyes were cold. "But you are working for someone."

John made an expression of indecision. "He believes I am working for him. I am still undecided, to be honest with you."

"Working, doing what?"

"You remember you told me that anytime you encounter something...odd, in your bio-investigations, you aren't allowed to handle it yourselves, because some government higher-up mandated it be allotted to another department?"

Lestrade's eyes widened. "You're not serious!"

"I can't really tell you more than that, so don't ask, Greg," he said quietly. "Just...I have a bad feeling about this whole investigation and I think it could possibly be connected to an assignment I've been handed."

"When did this start, John?" Lestrade looked more relieved than concerned by his honesty, which was a good sign, and John hoped he would remain that way as he probably would need an ally before this mess was over.

"Right after that spy ring broke in down here trying to reclaim that microfilm," he answered, shrugging. "I presume I attracted someone's attention. The connection to your mysterious disappearance case is entirely coincidental, I promise."

"Well, I have no proof and no real reason anyhow to turn you in for anything," the DI said slowly. "But you're going to need to tread lightly, John - I won't cover for you if whatever you're playing at goes pear-shaped."

"Fair enough." John crossed his arms, and then looked back down at the photograph. "But you do see why the average officer here isn't supposed to see things like this?" he asked dryly, indicating the picture.

Lestrade looked back down at the photograph, and its subject - a life-sized stone angel on the front doorstep of a London house, face distorted in a malevolent grimace of hatred and stone hands outstretched toward the man holding the camera phone. It was like a childhood bogeyman and a bad religious experience all rolled into one, and he'd be very surprised if he didn't have nightmares tonight just from remembering it.

"Your people are more than welcome to it," he said with a shudder. "_More_ than welcome, John."

* * *

Mycroft Holmes was not at all appreciative of his mobile alert going off at ten minutes after midnight, when all citizens who must be awake at five the next morning should be sound asleep.

_What can you tell me about six-foot-high stone angels that apparently can snap a man's neck?_  
JW

He groaned and reached into his bedside table drawer for the aspirin bottle.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

"We've got to figure out how the third missing person got that angel figurine," John said suddenly, setting his coffee cup down with a slight sloshing noise.

Lestrade glanced up over the top of his breakfast sandwich, teeth frozen in the bread. His eyebrows rose questioningly.

"It's too much of a coincidence that the statue is gone and we've a photograph of the same description seen outside the fourth victim's house," he clarified.

Lestrade swallowed and dabbed his mouth with a paper napkin. "John, you do understand the figurine was no more than twelve inches high, if that, according to the cleaning woman, and that...that _thing_, last night, was at least six feet tall? Besides, do you hear yourself? Claiming a - an angel figurine came to life and killed a man? Come on!"

"I wasn't trying to explain it, I'm just pointing out that it's a bit much to be coincidence, don't you think?" he asked.

"I'm trying _not _to think," Lestrade retorted. "In the light of day, it sounds like I'm a right nutter for even contemplating believing this rubbish. Besides, I've got an unsolved murder attached to a string of four disappearances and that's a sight more important than a missing statue and what's probably a faked photograph. It's a bad practical joke, John, that the boys are playing on us, nothing more."

"Sure of that, are you?" John asked mildly. He received a frosty glare, and shrugged easily. "Well, it's a good job we have different angles to work on. There is one more thing that stood out to me about the murder victim, though," he added, changing topic to divert attention from their escalating conflict.

Lestrade plopped his sandwich down and pulled out his notebook.

"There were absolutely no signs of violence on the body anywhere," John answered in response to the DI's expectant look. "That's significant because, like I pointed out, the man was two hundred pounds plus, and he was almost six feet tall - it would take a very unique murderer to be able to cleanly snap his neck without exerting any other signs of violence on the body whatsoever. There were no bruises on the arms, no signs of trauma to the head or back, nothing at all. It's like the fellow just stood there and let whoever it was break his neck from behind. Very odd."

Lestrade frowned as he repocketed his notebook and picked up his sandwich, picking idly at the cheese stuck to the upper bread slice. "You did say he was probably paralysed with fear..."

"Enough to stand there and let someone - or something - kill him without even trying to fight back?"

"Well, it happens in vampire movies," his friend quipped, grinning around his sandwich, and their chat drifted into less sobering channels for the remainder of their hastily-snatched breakfast.

John went his separate way as they entered the Yard, and soon was engrossed in a series of post-mortems and very boring paperwork cross-referencing similar past knifing cases from the last twenty-five years for a flowchart Hopkins needed for a profiling seminar. He didn't even notice it was well past luncheon until his mobile mysteriously received signal, an unusual occurrence in the depths of the morgue.

_I'll have a car waiting for you outside in an hour. We need to talk._  
MH

Annoyed, he shot off a quick reply and continued to work.

_Busy. I've a real job, remember. Give me three hours_.  
JW

Barely had he sent the message when he had a reply.

_If you have photographic evidence in your possession of a Weeping Angel, you may not have that long. Get in the car, John._  
MH

He slowly lowered the phone, chilled despite his calm acceptance of how weird his life was getting. What did the man mean, he might not have that long? He idly pulled up the scan he'd made of the enlarged photograph from the lab, and shuddered despite his hardy nerves at the malevolence of the figure depicted on his computer screen.

But be that as it may, Mycroft Holmes was not paying his primary wages and John wasn't about to go skiving off the quite decent job that was keeping him from going insane with boredom. He ignored the text and returned to his work, which included a write-up of _clostridium botulinum_ poisoning for Lestrade's serial suicide case. An hour of research and typing in his search-and-peck plodding slowness proved more exhausting than any post-mortem, and by the time he was finished he was more than ready for a break. Coffee, if nothing else, though the swill the boys made for the lounge was not much stronger than coloured water. It would have to do.

He returned to the morgue ten minutes later, a steaming mug held gratefully in his grasp, prepared to begin wrapping up for the night.

He was halfway across the room before the mug dropped from his hands, shattering on impact with the cold floor. He stepped back a pace, and stared disbelievingly at his computer screen.

Either he was going insane, or there was a life-sized, slightly blurry image of a stone angel literally _coming out of the screen_ at him. As he had displayed no signs of insanity before now, and as his life had become so bizarre he barely recognised reality anymore, he was inclined to actually believe his senses. The photo of the angel on his computer was coming to life, literally coming out of the screen at him. Not a big deal, yeah? Happened all the time in movies, scary ones, very scary ones that made him hide under the covers as a child, scary enough that he really shouldn't be seeing things that reminded him of that numbing terror at this point, and he thought he had PTSD _before _this, all right!

Okay, so he was probably going insane, since he was just barely aware enough to recognise increasing hysteria when he saw - felt - whatever, it.

He dragged both hands down over his face, hoping that his vision would clear once he'd taken a deep breath and got hold of himself.

He rather thought he could be forgiven the unmasculine exclamation of fright when he opened his eyes - to see that the angel figure had nearly completely morphed out of the screen and was now standing on the ground in front of his desk chair. It was oddly like a hologram, for he could still see the outline of his new computer and desk through it, but solid enough to make him resolve to not go a step close to the thing, thank you very much. He was a soldier, and he liked to think a brave one - but there was a fine line between bravery and stupidity and he was going to remain firmly on the safe side of that line.

"Okay," he whispered, and shocked at the hoarse rasp of his voice cleared his throat and tried again. "Okay, this is...not good, really." He inhaled slowly, willing his heart to quit racing, and began a strategic retreat toward the morgue doors, keeping his eyes fastened on the enemy as any trained soldier would.

Someone slammed a door down the corridor, and his eyes jerked momentarily to the morgue exit out of reflex, though he turned back a moment later -

And the angel was now a full two metres from the desk, still hazy but distinguishable clearly in the cold morgue light, its stone face set in a malevolent sneer, its claw-like hands outstretched toward him.

John suddenly had a very bad feeling, like ice crystallizing sharply in the pit of his stomach, that he knew precisely what had killed that man currently residing in drawer B41.

He had left his mobile on the desk, so he could not call for help, and the morgue was not equipped with a panic button because who in their right mind would be after anything down here anyway?

"Besides, every time I look away you move," he spoke aloud, and found the action oddly cheering. "How's that work, then, eh? You only move when I'm not looking at you? _Can_ you move at other times?"

It was risky, but he was rather at a stalemate and he probably should learn his enemy as best he could if he had any hope at all of surviving something that his brain was still rejecting as too incredible to be real.

He took a deep breath, and then blinked as quickly as he could, once.

And he scrambled backward another few steps when he opened his eyes again, to see that the angel had moved another two metres forward in that brief nanosecond. It was now frozen with one arm stretched up in a curve, pointing at him, while the other still reached forward with talon-like fingers. Its stone eyes, ghastly blank above a snarling stone mouth, pinned him in place, as he forced himself to study it.

"Right, definitely won't be doing that again," he said aloud, thinking furiously. "What are you, anyway?"

The stone figure remained silent and motionless, locked in its paroxysm of fury.

"And how am I supposed to get rid of you?" he muttered in dismay, as he carefully kept one eye on the statue, winking the other to keep his eyes from drying out. He repeated the process with the other eye, and continued, however odd he knew it looked. "Taking no chances on you snapping my neck, thank you very much," he added, glaring at his motionless opponent.

Thunder rolled outside, nearly causing him to jump out of his skin, but he managed to keep his gaze locked on the angel despite the sudden noise. Lovely. Nothing could further convince him he'd stepped straight into a bad television program, or so he thought.

And then the lights flickered, amid another boom of thunder.

It was only a moment, just a split second as the circuits flicked under strain of a summer storm - but when they came back on the angel was only a few yards in front of where he stood, squashed as far up against the wall as he could be. The angel was a bit more solid-looking now, though a translucent shadow seemed to still connect it to the computer monitor.

John swallowed hard, desperately trying not to blink again and praying the lights would remain on. Of all the times for the Yard's generators to malfunction, this would be the absolute worst.

Suddenly the door at his side opened, and he resisted the urge to moan in despair, because not only was an innocent person walking through it but that person would never believe what was happening. John was still not entirely sure he wanted to believe it himself.

His peripheral caught a vision of long, slender legs in a pencil skirt and a dark-garbed figure suddenly looking up from a mobile phone.

"Really, Doctor Watson," Mycroft Holmes's assistant said with severity, sighing. "You will learn quickly that you should take our mutual employer's advice with more alacrity."

"Ah...are you seeing it, too, then?" John all but squeaked, staring at the angel.

"Only partially corporeal, that's good. Keep your eyes on it. Origin point?" she asked in a tone of bored resignation, rummaging through her handbag.

"...My computer monitor," he replied in bewilderment. "Was looking at the picture and - Oi!"

His exclamation of horror was due to the fact that the assistant calmly pulled a small semi-automatic from her purse, snapped a silencer onto it, and sent a bullet shattering through his brand-new computer monitor.

Glass shards flew, and the angel disappeared.

"You couldn't have just pulled the plug?" he asked, surveying the damage with mingled relief and irritation.

"Wouldn't have destroyed the image," she replied with an easy shrug. "Now it's trapped and won't be released. Where's the paper copy of that photo?"

"Probably Lestrade's office," he replied, as he took a deep breath and held it. "You don't suppose -"

"Show me," she said curtly, replacing the handgun in her bag. "I do hope you've a good paper shredder within reach."

* * *

An hour and a half later, the photograph had been destroyed (it had been lying on Lestrade's desk, thankfully _without_ a living statue coming out of it) and John was sitting across from Mycroft Holmes in a small bistro off the Strand.

"I did warn you," the man said mildly, as John knocked back his second glass of wine and wished it were not gauche to ask for something stronger.

"What, exactly," he began, shaking his head, "were those things, Mr. Holmes. What in the name of sanity -"

"They are called Weeping Angels," Mycroft replied calmly, leaning back in his chair. He tapped his lips thoughtfully with one finger. "You have questions."

"Oookay...what is a Weeping Angel?"

"An alien race."

"Charming. Why are they called weeping angels?" John rather thought it sounded like a girls' pop band from the nineties.

"Because they typically default to a stance in which they appear as stone angels with their hands covering their eyes, especially if they are working in groups."

John allowed this to revolve slowly through his mind. "Because they don't want to see each other?" he supplied.

Mycroft Holmes actually looked slightly surprised. "Well done, Captain. Have you deduced their secret?"

"Only that they can move faster than anything we humans know about when no one is looking at them, but they're frozen if someone is." John finished his breadstick and reached for another; he had skipped lunch and had not been hungry for a while after confronting the angel in the morgue, but now he was starving. "What's the scientific explanation for what they can do?"

"The Weeping Angels are the deadliest being that evolution has ever produced, Doctor Watson. Their primary skill is their speed, as you have seen first-hand. They are what is called quantum-locked; meaning, that when someone is looking at them, they cease to exist in their own plane and turn to stone, to our appearances. Once no one is watching them, they are able to move outside our conception of time, covering great distances in nanoseconds."

"Ah...and they're able to come alive out of my computer screen? You owe me a replacement again, by the way," John mentioned around his penne. "How does that work?"

"There is an ancient text which mentions the angels, warning anyone who reads it that 'that which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel.'" (1) Mycroft looked him squarely in the eye. "That is why you will never find photographic or video evidence of the creatures, no matter how hard you dig; they are able to channel media to give themselves life."

John's eyes widened. "Rather nasty trick, that."

He received a faintly amused look in response. "The Weeping Angels have been known and feared through history as the 'Lonely Assassins', because of the fact that they are, literally, the perfect hired killer. They appear and disappear faster than any human can trace, and they are virtually unstoppable once they are in corporeal form." (2)

"How do you stop them, then?" John asked, looking up.

Mycroft's lips twitched in a thin, unpleasant frown. "You don't," he said.

"But I mean - they have to be stopped somehow!"

"There is no way to stop them, Captain; I order you to cease any intentions you may have of trying." Mycroft's voice had turned hard, brittle with ice. "You will not investigate these creatures any further, is that quite clear?"

"Quite," John snapped back, a growing suspicion niggling at the back of his mind. "Right, of course. There's only been murder done, and a string of disappearances that might be connected to the things! Does that mean nothing to you?"

"You will learn very quickly, Captain," Mycroft said with quiet menace, "that you would do well to not ask questions but rather follow orders as a soldier should."

John slapped his napkin onto the table and stood, leaning forward with one hand firmly on the tablecloth. "They're in your employ, aren't they?" he hissed furiously. "They're not 'lonely assassins' - they're _your_ assassins! They're a task force for you, aren't they? What did those people ever do to you, to deserve such a fate?"

"Sit down, John, you are drawing unwanted attention to us both. Now!" The last word was fairly snarled, and John reluctantly acquiesced. He leaned back and folded his arms over his chest, motioning for Mycroft to continue.

The man's face was calm, but his eyes glinted with warning. "A Weeping Angel's power lies in that it feeds off of temporal energy; namely, that it sustains itself with unused time. Its touch sends its victim back in time to before he was born; the angel then utilizes the potential and unrealised years which the victim never lived as its sustenance."

"So these people who have disappeared from locked rooms - they've been sent back in time? What gives you the right to decide that kind of punishment - execution, more like?" John demanded hotly.

Mycroft's eyes flashed fire. "The people who have disappeared, if you must know, Doctor Watson, were enemies of or serious threats to society or the Crown. Double agents, spies, human traffickers, the like. They were targets to be eliminated, nothing more. And if you cannot think of such beings in that manner, then you are not the man I need in my employ." Grey eyes regarded him piercingly. "This development is unfortunate and irrelevant to the task I have set you; I have enlightened you only so that you may safely divert the investigation at Scotland Yard to other channels so that no innocents are harmed. I am not responsible for any harm which may occur because of foolish bystanders, while my assassins are merely carrying out their jobs."

"It's still far outside the law," John said, swigging the rest of his wine with a grimace.

"Besides the fact that these people were an utter menace to the law-abiding citizens of this metropolis and this was done for the common people's protection - _I _am outside the law, John, as you should have deduced by now," Mycroft Holmes replied coolly. "And as a man who has an illegal firearm in his possession, you are hardly one to throw stones about bending legalities."

"_Touché_," he muttered, feeling somewhat bellicose in the face of cold-blooded execution of this sort. It inspired a sort of horror in him that was faintly reminiscent of scary movies as a child, a sense of helplessness against something he did not understand, a fear of the unknown and inexplicable. "But an innocent man is dead because your precious assassin wasn't satisfied with sending the last victim back to the Dark Ages or whatever - it snapped a man's neck outside the victim's house!"

"It had no need for more temporal energy, as it had just, for lack of a better term, gorged itself upon our Mr. Bartlett's remaining years," Mycroft replied with a casual shrug. "The second man's death was most unfortunate."

"Unfortunate?" John spat out through clenched teeth. "That's all you can say about it?"

"That is all I _will _say about it, John. And if you wish to remain in my employ and on my good side, it is all you will say about the matter as well." Cold eyes penetrated his defences, laying him and his conflicting sense of morality bare before an observational power beyond his comprehension. "You need to decide upon whose side your loyalties lie, Captain, before our mutual subject shows himself in this timeline again."

"And you believe he will, sometime soon?"

"If he follows his usual patterns, yes. His current regeneration has not been back to Earth in nearly three of our decades, and the unusual temporal shifts caused in the last few weeks by my, shall we say, special task force, are sure to attract his admittedly sporadic attention."

It suddenly occurred to John that he was being played; it was certainly a possibility that these angel assassins were nothing more than bait to draw in a far bigger fish. And if they were the bait, then John was probably the lure and hook.

He'd never even met the Doctor, but he already felt a bit sorry for the alien, regardless of his guilt in crimes against humanity or the destruction he always heralded. Being the last of a species, if Mycroft's files were accurate, had to be a terrible burden upon any man - and not knowing that such a heartless force in humanity was baiting a trap for him until it was too late, seemed highly...unsporting.

Mycroft Holmes was not a man John would want for an enemy - and so he kept his mouth shut, fully intending to keep things that way.

* * *

(1) See _The Time of Angels_, Doctor Who Series Five  
(2) There's a lot of fandom speculation about the evolution of the Weeping Angels from _Blink_, where their primary goal seems to be sending people back in time, to _Time of Angels_, in which they turn far more aggressive and begin snapping people's necks. Personally, regardless of what behavior they adopt and why, I consider them to be the single most scary creature ever invented in television history. *shiver*


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

Two days passed rather uneventfully. John paid up his rent, thankful that he actually had the money to do so well in advance this time - there were benefits to working steadily, certainly - and continued his work as police coroner and unofficial sounding board for DI Lestrade, who was no closer to solving his mysterious disappearance cases than he had been a week ago. John knew better than to tell him about his conversation with Mycroft Holmes, though he could not help but drop hints that the angel picture which had so mysteriously disappeared from every media outlet in the offices was more important than the man was crediting it for being.

"Again with these ruddy angels, John!" Lestrade exclaimed at last, after John had done some investigating on his own and found out that the angel figurines were usually sent through the post to Mycroft's intended victims, whereupon they lay wait until the right time and pounced, thereupon absorbing the energy from the vanished victim and growing to their life-size. "It was a doctored photo, that's all! Someone's playing us and that's all there is to it. I am far more concerned with the murder and the abductions, I've no time for your little theories about creepy angel statues!"

"And you're going to deny that the statues aren't missing?"

"We only have proof - and hearsay proof at that - that one is missing, we don't know that the others even had one in the first place, John."

He was forced to concede, aware that Lestrade had closed off his mind to the unexplained just as most of the populace did (it certainly explained to him how no one had ever caught out these alien life-forms he'd been learning about, if they were so gullible as to believe the far-fetched government cover-ups each time something happened). He was not yet ready to pick a side in the business, and so he wisely stayed out of things.

Until late one night he was nodding off over his (yet again) new computer, and Lestrade burst into the morgue, talking to someone on his mobile and gesturing for John to grab his coat and come.

"Got a fifth one," he mouthed, one hand over the receiver.

"Disappearance, or are we talking about your botulism suicides?" John asked, shrugging into his jacket.

"Disappearance. Only been a few minutes, we think," he said, snapping the phone shut and holding the door open for John and his cane. "Man disappeared from a house full of people, this time - no traces, and several eyewitnesses!"

John stared at him as they hurried along a corridor. "You mean a bunch of people saw a man vanish into thin air?"

"According to the call, yeah. Granted, I rather think they're passing some stuff around at that party that could explain them seeing a lot of weird things, but we have to check it out given that it sounds the same as the others. Thought you might want to come along."

"I'm not your usual forensic-medical expert," he mentioned uncertainly.

"No, but Anderson asked specifically for you if he was going to be dealing with a bunch of dope-heads this late at night on a Friday. Said he'd prefer to have an ex-soldier with him in case they were a rowdy bunch. You know he's practically worthless in a scrap."

"I feel so wanted," John said dryly, as he swung into the police car beside Lestrade.

His companion grinned, and turned on the lights and siren before pulling out into late evening traffic.

It was a short enough drive, and within a half-hour they arrived at the address, easily distinguished by the police cordon and the milling shadows that indicated the party inside had at least attempted to break up after the disappearance. They pushed through the crowd, Lestrade held the tape up for John to walk under, and entered the house. Anderson's men and a drugs squad were already packing up, and as they stood in the entryway looking around the sergeant walked up, a look of annoyance on his face.

"Same as all the others," he grunted in response to Lestrade's inquiry.

"Except that there were witnesses this time," John supplied, glancing about with curiosity.

"If you can call them that," the forensics expert replied dryly. "I'd be surprised if anyone in this place can walk a straight line at the moment or see only _one_ of anything, much less give accurate eyewitness accounts of something like a fellow disappearing into thin air."

"You're telling me we got nothing useful out of anyone?" Lestrade asked incredulously.

"Here, follow me and I'll show you the layout. They all say the chap went out to the kitchen here for another round, and ten seconds or so later they heard a crash, like glass shattering. Two of the less out-of-it members of the party came in after him, found his drinking glass in shards on the floor just there in front of the table - we'll have photos shortly, sir - and no signs of the man anywhere. Kitchen's outside door was locked on the inside, windows blocked by heavy plants and latched on the inside. Only one door out to the rest of the house, and it led back to the party in the lounge, no one saw anyone follow him in."

"Even if they did, you can't just hide a body in a kitchen without leaving traces," Lestrade mused.

"Or without leaving the _body_," John added with a flash of dark humour. "Tell me, Anderson," he asked suddenly, looking around the small kitchen, "have you found an angel statuette anywhere in the house?"

"A...what?"

"A stone angel statue, about...so tall? Or a dust ring where something that size might have stood in here?"

Anderson looked at him like he'd suggested bungee jumping off the Southwark Bridge. "No, nothing like that," he drawled with an edge of sarcasm. "Why, you collecting the things now?"

John rolled his eyes, not bothering to respond. "Mind if I take a look around, Detective Inspector?" he asked, careful to remain professional on an official job.

Lestrade, who was busy groaning behind his hands at the futility of the case in general, gestured with one hand for him to go on and do whatever. John swept the counters in the kitchen with a glance and then unlatched the door to the back garden. He carefully checked the small expanse of grass and the alley behind the house for anything amiss before leaving, wishing he'd been able to bring his gun just in case. But there was nothing for it but to go on and hope his cane would be a suitable enough weapon if need be, and he began to move down the alley, looking about for signs of any recent activity.

After all, no matter how fast the blessed things were, a six-foot-high stone angel (or even less, if this one wasn't full-sized) wasn't exactly inconspicuous except possibly in a church yard. It could conceivably be hundreds of miles away by this time, or it could be in hiding close by, waiting for the furor to die down. He suspected the missing man was not the intended victim, since the fellow who disappeared was not the owner of the house. If the 'lonely assassin' had missed his target, he would be back for the _right_ one at a later time - and in the meantime, the angel couldn't just pose itself in a back alley without drawing some sort of attention.

Mycroft Holmes also didn't strike him as the type to leave such a huge loose end untied, besides.

He continued down the alley and found himself a moment later under the sickly glow of a sparking, rusty street lamp. Wary of being caught unaware by the monsters that were beginning to scare him more than he wanted to admit, he carefully checked the shadows as he approached the light.

His boot suddenly scuffed into something, which rolled awkwardly and clanked against another object on the ground. Shining his pocket torch downward to add more light, he crouched under the lamp to see what he had kicked.

Fragments of something, stone or pottery of some kind, it looked like. He picked up one, inspected it, and then retrieved another chunk -

And inhaled with a sudden realisation.

The fragment he was holding held a very clear outline of _wing feathers_.

"So you can be smashed, is that it?" he murmured, looking down at the fragments. Was it really that simple? "You couldn't have been at full height, either, or else this isn't all of you..." He saw a few larger pieces hidden in the shadows, in addition to a scattering of shards and fragments about his feet, but not enough to indicate a full life-sized angel having been destroyed. (1)

Pocketing the shard, he dug his cane into the ground for balance and stood stiffly, looking around at the eerily still night. "Someone got to you before I did, hm," he mused aloud. "Needed to smash you under a light because you have to be _seen_ in order to be frozen and destroyed...yes, it does make sense." But had it been Mycroft's men who'd done it? Taken out their assassin because of a job botched or because he didn't want John or anyone at the Yard to find out about his little deadly task force? "I wonder -" he halted suddenly, as a soft scuffle of shoe against gravel at the other end of the darkly-shadowed alley reached his war-honed hearing.

He froze instantly, not breathing, and strained his ears against the stillness of the night and the distant sounds of traffic and music playing in nearby houses.

And then again - there was definitely someone trying to quietly move away down the dark alley.

Well, then.

Adrenaline suddenly fuelled him with a heady rush of excitement, making him almost lightheaded and yet strangely, brilliantly alert. John hefted his torch into his right hand - he was not going to be taken unaware by one of the ruddy angels, thank you! - and set off in a dead sprint toward the sound, counting on the element of surprise and determination to succeed his endeavour.

In the euphoria of adrenaline, he didn't realise he'd left his cane on the ground beside the fragments of a Weeping Angel. (2)

A figure - human, not angel, thank heaven - in a long, dark coat detached itself from a wall of shadow and belted it down the alley ahead of him, darting recklessly over a crosswalk right in front of a black cab before clambering up a fire escape across the street. John darted after him with a shouted apology to the irate driver, determined not to let his quarry escape, and the chase was on.

For a good solid ten minutes, the figure led him around and across and up and down the rooftops and streets of that portion of London, working he thought in a circuitous pattern back toward the house where he'd left Lestrade and the rest of the boys from the Yard. Try as he might, the figure could not shake John's dogged pursuit, and it was only as he leapt over a narrow ledge between two rooftops that it occurred to him that he was actually running and leaping tenement roofs and where the devil had he left his cane, anyhow?

He finally caught up with the fleeing man a few streets away from where they'd begun, as the figure slowed to a halt, gasping for breath, and appeared to give up the chase. Black-gloved hands lifted in the air in a universal sign for surrender as John darted up, trying not to show how winded he was from the unexpected but exhilarating pursuit.

"All right, all right, you are persistent, I'll give you that," the man said, coughing a bit in the crisp air as he caught his breath. His deep voice was cultured and almost disdainfully posh, obviously British but with an odd, faintly foreign accent that John couldn't quite place. "Whatever it is you think I did, I promise you you're wrong."

"Indeed?" John managed, puffing a bit as he slowed his breathing. "I suppose you always skulk in alleys behind crime scenes and then run from pursuit _over the_ _bloody rooftops? _Are you desperate, or just an idiot?"

The man turned at last so that his face was lit by the street lamp above them, and grey-blue eyes danced mischievously at him. "Well, you followed me, so what does that make you, then?"

John snorted, amused despite himself. "Why exactly were you lurking about back there, eh?" he asked, carefully scanning the man's figure for signs of concealed weapons or the like.

His opponent was well over six feet tall, possessing a pair of piercing eyes and a shock of curly dark hair. Immaculately dressed in a suit that could have come off a runway at Paris Fashion Week but with a somewhat natty dark overcoat and soft blue scarf, he cut an impressive but somehow out-of-place figure in a grotty London street. Something just was not quite right, John thought, but could not put his finger on what precisely it was that gave him that impression.

"I do not lurk!" the man said indignantly. "I was...observing."

"Well, I do beg your pardon, in that case," John replied dryly. "Why exactly were you _observing_ back there, then?"

"I really don't see how that's any of your business, Doctor," the man said curtly, as he flipped up the lapels and collar of his coat, fastidiously buttoning it closed despite the warm night.

"You were found outside a crime scene acting suspiciously, so I daresay it is our business," he retorted. "And furthermore - wait, how did you know I was a doctor?"

"The same way I know that you're only recently come into significantly-improved financial status, that you are back from some sort of skirmish in the Middle East, where you were injured but not in that leg that holds a psychosomatic limp, _entirely _psychosomatic by the way, you really should work on that. Also you are good friends with the Detective Inspector in charge of this case but your loyalties are divided between your current occupation as...police coroner, I imagine; and your more secretive employer, about whom I know nothing whatever save your unease regarding your task set before you - from which I can deduce that it is something which is either incredible to belief or else slightly on the border of illegality. I suspect UNIT pays your employer's considerable salary, though it could easily be one of three agencies. Either way, your hesitation to fully jump to his defence shows you are a human of morals, though flexible ones." The bizarre man smiled, almost predatorily, at him, extending a hand with what appeared to be genuine geniality. "What is your name, Doctor?"

"...Er. Watson. John Watson," he said despite his misgivings, shaking the hand which was held out to him. How on earth had the fellow rattled all that off without drawing a breath? "And you are?" he then asked curiously.

"Oh, I'm a Doctor too, you know," the fellow said airily, wrapping his scarf round his neck. John raised a sceptical eyebrow, and the man looked highly affronted. "What?" he asked indignantly. "I will have you know I am completely competent in my...field of study. _Completely_."

"And your field of study is, what, exactly? Poking about crime scenes? Oh, please - are you a journalist?" he asked suddenly, hoping Lestrade was not going to kill him if it were true. "Looking for a story, are you?"

"Ugh, nothing of the kind," the man replied with a dramatic expression of sheer disgust. "Journalists, quite a pathetic lot, far too gullible in my experience, and they only grow worse in the coming centuries. I assure you I have no official connections whatsoever with any media of any sort. But you, John Watson..." He took a few steps forward, into John's personal space, though John refused to give an inch. "You're a writer, you are - but you are not one of _them_. Do you have any real idea what it is you're dealing with?"

John blinked, trying to break the connection of those deceptively mesmerizing eyes, and shivered slightly. On impulse, he decided to play a hunch. "You might be surprised," he said quietly, and pulled the fragment of angel wing from his pocket.

The man's eyes widened, and he stepped back a pace, looking warily across the fragment. "You know what it is, then," John ventured, more confidently. "You might even be the one who destroyed it, eh?"

"You are entirely too inquisitive for a human, John Watson."

"Yes, so I've been told," John answered slowly, "...though not precisely in that very..._alien_ terminology."

The flicker of alarm that shadowed his opponent's face was answer enough, and the truth lit up before him like a landscape laid bare in a lightning storm.

Before he could even say anything, the man had given him a strange sort of smile, and raised what looked like an odd pocket-sized torch, pointing the glowing tip toward the street lamp above them.

John glanced up, mystified, just in time to be completely blinded as the light popped and plunged the street into darkness.

And his quarry darted away into the night, leaving John roundly cursing his gullibility and the Doctor's elusiveness.

He gave chase, of course, though the man - not a man, he belatedly corrected himself - had a good head start on him this time and basically had superhuman abilities to not get himself killed like ordinary people running dangerously through crowded streets and around sharp corners. He lost the Doctor in an alley back near the crime scene, a few minutes after they'd begun the chase anew. A moment later he felt a sudden, powerful gust of wind whip round a corner, strong enough to make him stagger and loose leaves about his feet spiral upward in lazy whirlwinds. A peculiar wheezing groan - he recognised it instantly from the recording in Mycroft's files - indicated that the being he was supposed to be pursuing had escaped in his natural habitat, and would not be found by human means until he next landed on Earth's surface.

John had spent the last half-hour chasing an alien over the rooftops of London, only to have him slip away at the very end just like he managed to in every story and folktale Mycroft possessed about him.

He berated himself silently for his own credulity as he returned to the crime scene to find his cane, and wondered when the phrase _chasing an alien over the rooftops of London_ had stopped making him doubt his sanity.

* * *

(1) I did ask my good friend PGF, who has been a Who fan for years, if I was the only one who thought taking a chisel and sledge hammer to one would be more logical than trying to get two of them to stare at each other, and she said that she'd never heard anyone put forth that particular hypothesis before, so hopefully my 6NAP reboot seen here is a bit original.  
(2) Obviously the cane and chase bit is lifted from ASIP, with obvious adjustments.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Lestrade was not happy with him for disappearing for almost an hour, especially when he returned empty-handed and with nothing to show for his absence than a piece of broken statue, which the DI dismissed as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. John's lack of leaning so heavily on his cane, however, was a subject of animated discussion as Lestrade thoughtfully gave him a ride home.

"Always knew it was psychosomatic," John muttered, embarrassed despite Lestrade's matter-of-fact treatment of the phenomenon. "Starting to twinge up again now, though, no matter how much I will it to stay put!"

"Well, psychosomatic doesn't mean the pain's not real, does it?" the DI pointed out reasonably. "Adrenaline makes men do crazy things - saw a traffic accident one time where a bloke built like Hopkins, only thinner, lifted a smashed-up car off his trapped baby girl. No wonder your brain forgot about the leg, a bit. Nothing like a good blood-pumping chase, eh?"

"Wish it hadn't been just a vagrant, though," John said, because for now that was his story about why he'd taken off after the Doctor. "Chased a dead end for thirty minutes and nothing to show for it except a smashed angel statue..."

Lestrade's theatrical groan made him smile fondly; the man still refused to believe anything he could not explain. Practical to the core, was his detective friend.

"All right," he chuckled, leaning back in the seat with a gesture of surrender. "No more about the Weeping Angels."

Lestrade gave him an odd sidelong look. "The _what_ angels?"

He swallowed, and schooled his features into an innocent expression. "Er...the creepy angels, Greg," he answered blandly. "You do think they're a bit disturbing, don't you?"

The DI shuddered. "Like clowns," he agreed succinctly. John was about to make a snarky reply about human nature when his mobile chirped.

_Any new developments?_  
MH

He hesitated only for a moment before sending off a reply.

_Should there be?_  
JW

Almost instantaneously he received an answer.

_You are trying to deceive the man who controls this city's CCTV, John. Do not make me doubt your intelligence._  
MH

_Nothing concrete to report. Met a suspect tonight who could in theory be our subject but have no proof. Suspect escaped in the dark._  
JW

_Do remember we both know your limp is only psychosomatic, Captain, and you are trained in such operations. The next time, I expect you to not allow him to escape again._  
MH

John put the phone away slowly, a crawling feeling of icy fear shivering its way down his spine.

* * *

Three days passed by uneventfully, the whole of London apparently having taken refuge indoors due to the incredible deluge that was threatening to drown the city's occupants. People were too busy trying to swim home to cause trouble, was the general consensus at NSY, and John welcomed the opportunity to have a day off due to a lack of work, spending it catching up on his blogging and correspondence.

Harry seemed as disinterested in his turn of fortune as she had in reconnecting with him when he returned, absorbed as she was in a failing relationship, and while John had a few old acquaintances he had even fewer with whom he really stayed in contact. That had been one of the hardest things in re-acclimating to civilian life, he had said once in a private, locked blog entry - he had been so accustomed to extremely close companionship in the military for so many years that to suddenly be cut adrift in a teeming metropolis with no friends or even colleagues had been utter misery. And still, though he had many friendly acquaintances at the Yard and the occasional pub night with Mike Stamford and the lads there, Lestrade was the only real friend he had made in the months he had worked there.

John missed that constant companionship, more than he would admit to anyone, and wished he could find a flatmate or someone to share digs with just to stave off the lonely boredom which threatened him still on occasion.

So it was that when Molly Hooper texted him that evening, asking if he wanted to go out for coffee the next morning, he accepted, despite not really being interested in dating her.

This turned out to be fortuitous, because in Molly Hooper John suddenly found a rather instant kinship that turned out to be just as rewarding in its own way as his odd but working friendship with Greg Lestrade. Molly was intelligent, brilliant even in her field, though she was certainly a Type-B personality and as such came off as somewhat dim in social interaction just due to insecurity in her own attractiveness. She admitted, when John was completely honest with her about his intentions, that she was simply lonely and she remembered him as being quite nice on the occasion they met, and so she had just taken a chance that he was not interested in anything more than a casual friendship. Mike Stamford, matchmaker that he was, had encouraged her endeavour, and they shared a laugh over the incurable romantic's penchant for setting couples up regardless of their compatibility or personal idiosyncrasies.

He could talk to Molly about their shared occupation, which seemed to get them odd looks on occasion but was at least a mutual topic of conversation, but he found that the girl was also quite knowledgeable in many fields about which he knew very little, including classical music and recent experimental medical discoveries. Molly also kept a blog, which though it consisted of little more than a pictorial history of her beloved grey tomcat Smokes was yet another point on which they connected easily in conversation. With their occasional meal or chat between John's work and her odd hours at St. Bart's Hospital, John grew over the next fortnight to like Molly quite a bit. She seemed to be an enigma of sorts - almost too sweetly innocent to be believable, and yet he occasionally saw a glimpse of something made of sterner stuff (after all, she did post-mortems, not a job for the squeamish or shy!) that fascinated him, in an entirely non-romantic way.

Nearly three weeks later, when John was safely ensconced in his bedsit longingly looking at To Let advertisements online in the vain hopes that an incredible deal on a flat would present itself, it occurred to him that he had heard little from his mysterious Mr. Holmes in the interim. The days had passed in a flurry of sudden overtime at his work, leaving him precious few hours in a week to devote to his unofficial employment - and even less time to attempt to extract information from his harried DI and friend regarding the string of mysterious disappearances which had petered down to only two since the last, John assumed aborted, attempt on the wrong man. In the meanwhile, John had learned little and seen nothing of another Weeping Angel or anything like it, much less was he able to track down any new information about the Doctor.

He had reached a standstill, apparently, and while Mr. Holmes assured him that the Doctor disappeared for far longer than weeks at a time John still wondered at the fellow's vanishing while the Angels were still around as obvious bait in a trap. A sizable paycheque appeared in John's chequeing account on the first of the new month, but he had not yet touched it; he had yet to decide to what extent he would be bought, if any, in this increasingly strange business.

Lestrade had finally solved the business of the botulism suicide contagion, revealing a cab driver of all people to have been the ingenious serial killer behind the string of deaths. John would have been more impressed had the killer not picked a seventh victim who out of sheer dumb luck had been immunized to _clostridium botulinum_ for a medical school study. The student's subsequent escape and panicked story to the police had lead to the easy capture of the cab driver and the revelation of his method. Still, it was certainly a coup for Lestrade, and for a few days the man was nearly insufferable in his grinning triumph. John could hardly blame him, as the poor fellow had a harder go of it than some due to his unshakeable ethic and refusal to resort to sucking up in order to climb the political ladder at the Yard.

John himself was slowly acclimating to civilian life, though he had yet to feel that he'd found a niche for himself in society and his surroundings. His life had turned into just a different sort of military structure; work, occasional social engagement, brief blogging, sleep, and back to work. While it was not a bad existence, per se, it was certainly less than ideal - and he was beginning to get a bit jittery waiting for something to happen. (He was also still shying away from anything vaguely resembling a cement or stone statue, no matter its shape, but that was the only high point in his adrenaline throughout the weeks.)

Then one night, he was wrapping up a rather boring blog entry and wishing desperately for something more entertaining to type about than a man who drowned in his own pudding, when he realised he had left his mobile on silent still, having changed it after it went off loudly that afternoon in the middle of the British Library. He hastily got up to check it, and found that he'd missed a call not ten minutes before from Molly Hooper. Thinking she was probably asking if he wanted to meet at the local pub quiz, he opened the text message which was date-and-timed shortly after the missed call.

_Rooftop, Bart's, 20 minutes. V. important._  
Molly

He'd never before gotten anything resembling a curt order from the mild-mannered girl, and so that in itself was worrisome.

And then he scrolled to the second message, which appeared to have been sent almost right after that one - almost as an afterthought.

_It's about the Doctor._  
Molly

He stared at the mobile for a good twenty seconds before he shook himself free and was galvanized into action. The work of five minutes got him his overcoat and gloves, which he donned before loading his gun and stuffing it into his pocket. As he sat in a cab, impatiently watching the fairy-lights of London flicker past the windows, his mind raced to connect a hundred different small details that should have tipped him off before now to his current situation.

Molly Hooper was obviously a friend, possibly former "Companion," so they were termed in the records, of the Doctor, that much was clear. Her sometimes odd expressions smacked of other-worldly influence, now that he'd been in a bit of contact with it through the extensive files on the alien being, and it fitted with the steely edge he'd occasionally glimpsed in her underneath the veneer of a young innocent. She had a way of controlling a conversation without appearing to, a skill he admired, and had been probing him lightly for information without his realising it for some days now. She was a being of contradictions, and it all fitted now that he knew she was aware of the Doctor's existence.

This meant, of course, that she knew he was searching the alien out, or knew at least that John was aware of his existence and was curious. He was about to be exposed as a spy, or else asked for help, were the two most likely scenarios.

John had no idea what to expect when he arrived on the wind-swept rooftop of St. Bart's Hospital, and it was absolutely _thrilling_.

* * *

The rooftop was lit well enough by the fading sunset-light and the basic lighting for the helipad, and so he found his way onto the roof with no difficulty - only to find that Molly Hooper was nowhere in sight.

His phone chirped.

_Give him time; could be late._  
Molly

John raised an eyebrow; that was unexpected.

He was about to respond when a blast of wind nearly knocked him off his feet. Staggering back a pace or two to regain his bearings, he stared as a massive blue object slowly ground into existence a few metres in front of him, turning from a translucent hologram into a solid box accompanied by enough whirring and groaning to wake the dead.

He'd never seen anything quite like it, a 'Police Call Box,' but that observation was secondary to the fact that it in every particular matched the files he'd been given by Mycroft Holmes regarding the alien being's time-ship.

Before his brain could fully register the entire bizarre scene, the door at the front of the object opened and a figure appeared, haloed by an odd bluish glow from behind. Though John had only seen him once before, in a darkened alley, he would by now recognise the fellow anywhere.

"Hallo again," the Doctor chirped with a wink. "All right if I leave this here, then?"

"Ah..." John coughed awkwardly, taken aback by the fact that the alien appeared to be expecting him. "You're parked on the helipad."

"The what?"

John gestured feebly to the pad and its painted outlines. "Medical transport...you're blocking the route in."

"Oh. Right, yes. Of course. Half a moment!" The door slammed in his face, and John stared blankly as the box began to slowly phase out of existence.

It reappeared twenty feet behind him a moment later, and the door was again wrenched open.

"Much better!" The figure stepped out of the glowing interior and shut the door before leaning against it, hands in his coat pockets. He regarded John with a deal of cold curiosity; John felt rather like a specimen under a microscope. "You're a bit of a surprise, I must say, John Watson," the Doctor ventured after a moment of awkward silence.

"That, I assure you, is mutual," John retorted, rubbing the back of his neck. "I take it that Molly Hooper is in your confidence?"

"Ah, lovely loyal Molly Hooper! A bit starstruck, that one, but as trustworthy as they come." The look of honest affection in the steely eyes took any sting out of the words. Then the look sharpened knowingly. "Are you as reliable, I wonder?"

John had the grace to colour in embarrassment.

"Well, it's no matter," the man sighed, leaning his curly head against the side of the box. He closed his eyes briefly. "I shall take what I can get, and unfortunately Ms. Hooper is visiting her mother this weekend in Essex. I had no other recourse but to ask her for recommendations, and to my surprise she mentioned a young man whom I know to be...shall we say, an interested party in myself."

John's blush deepened despite his determination to remain neutral until he could make an informed decision.

The Doctor regarded his mortification with twinkling eyes, though John's physician's observation skills noted the spots of hectic colour in the alien's cheeks, the slight irregular shivering of the thin body underneath the heavy overcoat.

John stepped to one side, curiously inspecting the boxlike structure which was called a 'T.A.R.D.I.S.' He then looked back at the alien who lived within it, and saw that the Doctor had been watching him through half-open eyes.

"It's a bit noisy," he observed with affected innocence. "Have you had the brakes checked recently?"

The Doctor blinked twice, and then gave a short burst of delighted laughter. "Oh, I quite like you, John Watson," he declared, thin lips curving in a charmed smile. "You will do, indeed."

"Pleased to hear it," he replied in a dry tone, though the man's humour was slightly infectious and he smiled as well. "Now...are you injured?"

"Am I..." The alien's gaze narrowed in suspicion. "Why would you ask that?"

"I'm a doctor - a _real_ one," he retorted pointedly, "and you have all the visible signs of a fever due to recent infection, plus the tenacity to probably not lie down until you _fall_ down like the stubborn idiot you are. Unless I am misjudging your character, which I doubt, since I know your life history as it pertains to Earth events at least."

The strange being stared at him for a second in what appeared to be genuine bewildered incredulity, before slowly nodding, as if his mind were going through the process of approval.

"In fact, I have been better," he declared at last, as he pushed off from the blue box and took a step - so unsteady a step that John's eyebrows rose in alarm - toward him. "Caught something two days ago on Selelucia, knew I shouldn't have eaten the local catch of the day, not when the eyeballs were still moving on the stick..." The alien's eyes unfocussed slightly as he wavered on his feet, and John jumped to his side before the fellow could fall over.

John nearly dropped him when he felt the heat fairly boiling off the thin body. "Is your core temperature normally above a human's?" he demanded in alarm, because how the man could stand to have a heavy overcoat on and still be pouring heat like this was nothing less than dangerous if not. He was also breathing quite heavily, almost painfully, as if some great weight were settling in his lungs. "And is your respiration normally this shallow?" (1)

"Mm?" The Doctor's eyes squinted at him in annoyance. "Core temperature?"

"Yes, your resting body temperature!" he snapped, staggering under the taller man's sheer enormous height. "How am I supposed to know how to help you if I've no idea what constitutes normal for you? Are you saying you don't even know your own resting body temperature and breathing?"

"Temperature and breathing?" the Doctor demanded crossly, batting away his probing hand. "You think I sit around and time my own _breathing_? Breathing's boring...now breathing _underwater_, that's an entirely more interesting experience, let me tell you, and - nnngh..." The words trailed off into a choked groan as the man's legs buckled and he promptly passed out cold.

John nearly went down as well, but managed to lower the limp form to the rooftop without cracking the infernal fellow's head on the stonework. "Charming," he groaned, pausing for a moment with his head in his hands. "I am stranded on top of Bart's Hospital with a sick alien and a governmental official probably tracking my mobile at the moment to find out where we are." He would not be at all surprised to learn that Mycroft Holmes had ways of finding out when the Doctor reappeared on Earth and whether or not John was in his bedsit at the time. Swearing at the necessity, he yanked his phone from his pocket with a pained, regretful grimace, and then pitched it off the side of the roof into a dark alley. He heard it shatter on the pavement below a moment later, and hoped that any tracking devices had also been shattered with it.

It then occurred to him that he probably should have asked Molly what in the name of sanity she was thinking summoning him, and did she know any health schematics for this species?

"Stupid, stupid, stupid!" he groaned, letting his head drop wearily against the side of the police box.

He jumped back a moment later with a yelp of surprise, nearly planting the seat of his trousers in a puddle as he fell backward. Something had just...touched him, for lack of a better term, though it had certainly not been a physical contact - but he had felt something just the same, upon contact with the alien ship. Something, unidentifiably alien, had brushed his consciousness.

He recalled that Mycroft's files had said the TARDIS was a living entity of sorts, that it at least possessed a type of soul and rudimentary sentience (though there were conflicting accounts of the remarkable ship's abilities to sense, feel, and communicate, since no official personnel had ever gained access to its inner workings). Bending over the inert Time Lord, who would not rouse from mumbling unconsciousness despite John's attempts to reanimate him, he wondered if the ship would allow him to at least drag the alien back inside. The last thing they needed was for a patient to be EVAC'ed into the hospital and Mycroft's Special Forces teams be alerted to their presence sitting in plain sight on the roof.

He tried the door handle, and received a sharp zap of warning that burned through his hand and fingers. Cursing, he tried to shake the sting out of his hand and ruefully regarded the ship with more healthy respect.

"I'm not your enemy," he tried speaking, hoping for voice recognition software or something similar. _Not yet_, _anyway_, he thought ruefully. He carefully, very carefully, placed a hand gently on the polished wood of the door. "I am only trying to help him, can you sense that much at least?"

Nothing happened, though that could just be because wood was a non-conductor and he was not going to touch the door handle again until he was dead certain it wasn't wired to a thousand volts.

He placed another hand gingerly on the blue panel, and felt a sort of thrumming suddenly tingle through his hands. It was like he was feeling pure energy, warm and tingling and rather pleasant. It was not unpleasant, only strange, wildly strange - _alien_, he thought with combined wonder and awe.

"Come now, you must be brilliant, you beautiful thing," he coaxed softly, though he felt a bit weird talking to a wooden panel. "Staying with him through all these centuries, all those galaxies - protecting him from all the evils in the universe?" The engines, wildly throbbing from inside the panel, suddenly purred in response, and he smiled. "You brought him here to get help, didn't you?" A pulse hummed through his hands, sending his nerve endings singing with energy. "I promise to honour my Oath, to do no harm," he added as a last resolve, eyes on the feebly-moving, feverish figure buried under a thick overcoat on the rooftop a few feet away. "Let me help him," he asked gently.

A soft click, and the door swung open a half-inch, spilling blue-grey light into the darkening night air and lighting up a sliver of rooftop with an ethereal, icy glow.

_I just talked a sentient alien ship into unlocking itself_, he thought with mounting hysteria, but he took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway.

* * *

(1) Nowhere in canon, according to my research, does it specifically state a Time Lord's body temperature; to me it seems logical that it is higher than a human's, meaning an increased blood flow due to having two hearts and a connection to the Vortex.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

John Watson had faced down the Taliban without flinching, escaping relatively sane and unscathed mentally. He'd seen enough unbelievable atrocities that he rather suspected nothing in civilian life could ever make him shudder with quite the same reactive horror.

And yet, his war-hardened but still human brain rebelled when confronted with the impossible.

He stumbled back out the door of the alien ship, shaking his head in wide-eyed disbelief, and then cast a wary look round the nearest corner of the modest wooden box. No, it was still the same shape on the outside, which therefore indicated that either A, he was going insane, or B, some sort of alien technology he had no hope of understanding made a smallish world exist on the inside of the ship.

He preferred to think that the latter was reality, little as it made sense, and if the idea had been around in literature for ages (he'd spent the whole of one summer in the country going through every wardrobe in the estate house in hopes of finding a portal to Narnia, for pity's sake) then he supposed it had its origins in some otherworldly tech.

Warily he stepped back through the doorway, one hand on the wooden door-jamb, and he felt a tiny trill of what he would swear was humming laughter reverberating through the connection.

"Yes, I'm sure you find this all spectacularly amusing, darling," he murmured, craning his head to glimpse the ceiling of the incredibly designed structure.

The ship hummed and the lights dipped for an instant before brightening under his scrutiny to reveal the interior of the vessel. He felt as if he'd stepped into an Apple-inspired ice sculpture, for the decor of the vessel was all cold, icy blues and greys with an undercurrent of clean, sterile white. His feet clinked delicately on satiny, silver flooring. Struts and support beams of transparent, glassy blue hues twisted about him in icy pillars, curving gracefully from floor to ceiling, which seemed to be a sort of foggy, fluttering drape of gossamer. The atmosphere was chilled, not enough that his breath condensed in the air but cooler than the spring evening had been, and the instrument panels before him in the centre console were cold to the touch when he gingerly brushed a finger against a chrome-plated clockwork mechanism. (1)

"Bit dramatic dark hero, is he?" he asked absently to no one in particular, gently brushing a hand over a sparkling orb that winked at him on the side of the console.

Somewhere below his feet, powerful engines rumbled as if in agreement, and the bluish lighting immediately warmed to a more welcoming glow, changing the chill of icy hues to a softer palette of relaxing cobalt and frosted silver.

"Thank you," he spoke hesitantly, and felt a hum of answer. The ship really was alive, he realised, and not just with a rudimentary intelligence. It was a living thing, intelligent and sentient and deeply connected with its master - _her_ master, he somehow subconsciously realised it was a female entity. "Can you show me how to help him, clever girl?" he asked, looking round the room.

The lights dimmed momentarily, and then a string of sparkling white fairy-lights glowed into existence to his left, outlining a doorway leading from the central console chamber.

"I'll take that as a yes," he mused with a smile, and as he turned to leave he heard a thrum of contentment reverberate through the silvered flooring. (2)

* * *

Nearly two hours and a good deal of cursing later (he would swear he could feel the ship laughing at him), John had managed to get the sick alien on his feet and half-carried, half-dragged him through the ship's seemingly endless corridors to what he presumed was a sort of medical wing, though he did not immediately recognise any of the medical instruments or alien technology with which it was supplied.

"By the way," he called absently into the air, as he extracted a blood sample (that much he could figure out), "if you've got a cloaking device on this thing you probably want to activate it, unless you want the first graveyard-shift intern who's sneaking a cigarette on the roof to find you."

The ship rumbled testily, and he felt a twinge of indignant affront brush his consciousness. He chuckled, placing the phial of blood onto the rack. "Yes of course you already thought of it. My apologies."

He began a series of tests with what little he could understand of the alien tech, trying to see if he could figure out what was causing the high fever (he was gambling that the boiling heat was not normal for the species) and a drifting in and out of consciousness, as well as two severe attacks of stomach cramps (note to self, the alien could projectile vomit just as well as a human).

Something on a console chirped at him, and he eyed it with well-founded wariness. "What?" he asked frostily.

It blipped what sounded suspiciously like a raspberry at him, and he sighed, reaching over to push the blinking button. A whir of machinery sent his chair rolling backward in alarm, as the arm of what looked like some sort of x-ray or scan machine suddenly whirred downward and sent a broad beam of green light playing over his patient from toe to curly head.

"I really hope that's a scan of some kind, and I didn't just hit the let's-kill-the-last-of-the-Time-Lords button," he muttered, tapping a nervous finger upon his lips.

He was relieved to see a screen pop into existence on the other side of the console, showing what looked to be the internal schematic of a human - _humanoid_, he amended with raised eyebrows, because it evidently had two hearts and a very bizarrely-constructed respiratory system - body, vital organs outlined in red and other systems in yellow. (3)

"Thank you," he muttered thoughtfully, tracing the blinking pathways with his eyes. "Obviously something centralised in the digestive system, no surprise there, and all the signs of a good old-fashioned food poisoning. I don't suppose you can analyse this for me?" he inquired hopefully.

Absolute silence.

He shrugged. "Worth a try, anyway. Well." He turned back toward his patient, who was showing signs of coming back to lucidity. "Awake, then?"

The man's eyes were blinking slowly, slits of intense blue flashing between dark lashes, and within a few seconds the alien's head revolved slowly from left to right, taking in his surroundings, and finally came to rest on John as he stood nearby, arms folded. The Doctor grinned lazily, and then cocked his head to one side on the thin pillow, as if listening to something only he could hear.

John raised an eyebrow as the Time Lord grinned wider, and looked back at his human saviour. "She likes you," he clarified, with a pleased chuckle.

"Who?"

"The TARDIS," the alien replied, smiling. "She says you are charming, and your military efficiency is very sexy."

John really didn't think his life could possibly get any weirder than blushing because an alien time-travelling spacecraft was _flirting_ with him.

"Yes, well." He coughed and cleared his throat weakly. "She was helpful enough to let me at least get you off the roof, though what precisely is wrong with you, I don't know enough to say. I've taken the liberty of re-hydrating you intravenously, reducing your fever with a few wet towels, and taking a blood sample for analysis - then she showed me this," he continued, gesturing to the scan. "I'm inclined to think, given that you are still coherent, that it's a simple case of eating something you shouldn't have rather than a serious illness; you fainted I suspect from dehydration and exhaustion and not from the fever. Unless your core temperature is considerably lower than humans' as a general rule?"

"No, in most ways Time Lord physiology is basically similar to human. All humanoid species carry the same basic cellular and systemic structure. My body temperature is, I suspect, typically higher than a human's, simply based upon the Vortex energies I can access if necessary, but it is not usually this elevated..." The alien looked up at him with interest. "So I merely have a bad case of galactic food poisoning, is that what you're saying?"

"With my limited knowledge, yes," John retorted, throwing up his hands in exasperation. "If you are lucid enough to discuss your physiology with me then you haven't been fatally poisoned by anything I'm familiar with."

"No, no, I am able to neutralise most toxins, it can't be anything of that sort," the Time Lord muttered absently. "But I never just get sick!" he exclaimed crossly, curling up on his side and whipping the sheet testily over his shoulders like a cape-blanket.

John would have sworn the ship found a method of snorting eloquently at the alien's sulking, and he smiled, patting the nearest wall with a gentle hand. A hum of approval rumbled against his fingertips, and the Doctor cracked one eye to pierce him speculatively.

"Are you molesting my ship, John?"

He whipped his hand away, feeling his ears burn, and glared at the amused alien. "You are an utter madman," he said, scowling.

"Oh, and I had thought you were smarter than that," the Time Lord said with a dramatic sigh. "Most of you funny little people have that worked out within an hour, John."

"Yes, well, I was a bit preoccupied with making sure you weren't going to _die_," he retorted, while mentally flipping through Mycroft's files for the proper terminology. "Or regenerate, is that what you call it?"

To his surprise, the alien's features suddenly tightened with a look of such utter weariness that it made him look centuries old - and perhaps, if the stories were to be believed, he was.

"Not this time, John," the man said quietly.

"Not this time? But -"

"Yes, I am aware that you've probably done your research, either with or without help from UNIT or Torchwood's old databases that Mycroft Holmes's men seized off the black market months ago," the Doctor replied wearily. "Time Lords do regenerate, John. But only a finite number of times."

John connected the dots immediately, and drew a long breath of surprise. "You are on your last regeneration?" he asked.

"I am. And _none_ of them were ginger!" the alien exclaimed in what looked like genuine frustration. Hands fastened in his thick dark curls, ruffling them violently and then flopping back to the bed-sheets. "Anyway, John Watson," he continued, fixing the man with a piercing gaze, "I am, in every sense of the term, quite literally the last of my species now. And if you turn me over to your employer as he wishes you to, you are in essence indirectly committing genocide in a war that is about to end, one way or another."

John stepped back a pace, alarmed at the knowledge that this man obviously held some sort of telepathic abilities or else was aware of his connection to Mycroft Holmes, but also horrified at the implications of that last statement.

"The hard truth is alarming, isn't it?" A sneer had crept into the alien's voice now, and John winced at the frosty lack of camaraderie that had formerly been present. "Are you aware I can read minds when in physical contact, John, and you grabbed hold of my arm when last we met?" His horror must have shown on his face, because the cold eyes turned positively glacial, and the Time Lord's lips thinned in displeasure. "Every thought, every plan you made to find me - I saw it all, John. Do you still intend to turn me over to your government, knowing what you do about the man who hired you? Knowing he's employed a deadly alien species, a portion of the Weeping Angels, to assassinate those he deems threats to your pitiful human race?"

John regarded him coldly, hands tightening in his pockets. "I haven't chosen a side yet," he said stiffly. "You've done nothing to prove his opinion of you wrong, now have you? Has there ever been a time - where the Earth was threatened and after the threat was neutralised, was there ever a time when you remained behind to help with the aftermath?" he demanded. The alien's eyes widened in surprise, and he pressed that advantage. "The stories might be part true, or part lie - but all of them agree, that once you've taken care of the supposed threat, you disappear, and everyone is left trying to salvage the wreckage of what had been their world! What sort of creature does that, leaves an innocent society trying to pick up the pieces of something that was not their fault? Do you condemn me for wondering who is more callous, the alien who directly threatens humanity, or the one who saves humanity only to then condemn it to years, even decades of recovery without any type of help?"

The Time Lord had turned a ghastly shade of pale, and he regretted that outburst only because it could not be helpful to a sick man - alien, not man, he reminded himself sternly as he pulled his emotions back under control. The knowledge he had of this Time Lord rang too true, hit too close to home, was far too similar to how most people viewed the current war zone in the Middle East. He was no proponent of war, was not in any way in favour of men and women risking their lives in an occupation of a country not their own - but someone had to try to clean up the mess others had made, had to try to help the innocents. The similarities between his own war experiences and this alien's behaviour stung him to the core.

"All I am saying," he finally added, more calmly, as The Doctor leaned back with furrowed brow, "is that while I agree that Mycroft Holmes cannot be trusted - you have given me absolutely no reason to trust you any more than I trust him. And until you can...I promise nothing." He vaguely felt a rumble of unhappiness below his feet, as the powerful engines throbbed in response to their master's mood, but ignored the feeling. "Tell me how to read and use these instruments so I can decipher what's making you so ill, and then we can set you on the road to recovery. Then, I have questions."

* * *

Another two hours passed, and as there had been no pounding on the door of the alien craft John assumed his ruse had saved them from Mycroft Holmes's locating them in London. A strange, half-mental conversation with the TARDIS had conveyed the inherent risk in allowing the man to find them, and he had been reassured that the ship realised the danger and was acting accordingly to camouflage itself.

The Doctor (John really wanted to assign the man a name because that was just confusing) had vomited two more times, bewailing his plight in such a melodramatic fit of whimpering that John threatened to give him an ice lolly and pat him on the head before stuffing a towel under the door as he left to drown out his sulking. He felt a small chirrup of amusement hum through the console at which he was trying to work out how to use the instruments for blood analysis, and he patted the counter affectionately.

"Always like this when he's sick, then?" he murmured, typing a tentative command according to the instructions he'd managed to pull up in a parallel window.

The room's lights twinkled briefly in agreement.

"So you take care of him all by yourself now, is that it, lovely?" he asked, genuinely curious. "Didn't he used to take friends along with him?"

The lights around him dimmed, and John could fairly feel the silent wail of misery that accompanied them. He looked up, surprised, and felt a brush of sadness against his consciousness. "I know at least up to his eleventh incarnation he had a constant stream of companions," he said quietly, thoughtfully. "Not much is known about his twelfth, and this is his last?" He received no answer, and continued speculatively, "He travels alone now, then? Why is that?"

A console chirped sadly at him with a tiny electronic pop, and he glanced over to the Time Lord, who was sound asleep, one thin arm flung dramatically over his head and the other trailing on the ground beside the medical bed.

John got up and walked over to examine the sleeping alien, watching as his chest rose and fell in a more natural breathing pattern. The temperature indicator on the bed - the Doctor had shown him that much before being sick the last time - showed that the fever was nearly gone, the illness due to a food toxin (John presumed some alien equivalent of salmonella, based upon the similarities he found in the bacteria-infused saliva sample) having run its course and the man's unique physiology having taken care of healing itself in record time.

John wondered absently why, if the Time Lord could basically heal himself from most toxins, he was worried enough to seek out Molly Hooper for aid; possibly with this being his last regeneration, he had simply become a bit paranoid? John rather thought if one were accustomed to simply growing back bits of one's self one way or another for centuries, suddenly finding one's self to be mortal would make a bloke a bit hypochondriacal.

The lights around him dimmed to a warm glow, and he felt the temperature rise a few degrees, a pleasantly non-medical scent, lavender and vanilla, filling the air a moment later. He smiled, and put a hand on the nearest wall. "You care for him quite well," he offered quietly, and felt a brush of smug agreement against his consciousness. "He will be fine now; and I must be going before I am missed." John pulled his jacket back on, buttoning it on his way to the medical wing's door, and turned back once to look at the scene. Then, with a last smile directed at the sleeping alien, he turned to the door.

It had disappeared. The wall now lay seamlessly smooth before his questing fingers.

"All right, what are you playing at?" he asked aloud, frowning.

He'd noticed things from his periphery as he'd helped the ailing Time Lord to the medical wing, doors appearing and corridors rearranging themselves, and he had presumed the ship was sentient enough to be able to shift its own shape - but he needed to leave before Mycroft Holmes tried to figure out why his phone was no longer in service, not to mention he had to get a few hours' sleep before work tomorrow morning...

"Come on," he coaxed, hands in his pockets. "Clever girl, you know I can't stay here - people will be looking for me, and then where will your Doctor be, eh?"

He received no answer, nothing at all, which was odd.

"She's not going to let you leave until she's sure you're not going straight to your employer to turn me in," a now familiar voice spoke up wearily from behind him.

John whirled around, to see that the Time Lord was standing on what appeared to be mostly steady legs, though he was wincing a bit at the stiffness in sore muscles. "You probably shouldn't be up," he suggested mildly.

As expected, the alien ignored him. "Pure transport. What is far more important, is what you are going to do when you leave here, John Watson."

"I smashed a perfectly good, and expensive, mobile phone so that no one could trace me to you, just before I dragged you inside your ship to let you be sick in peace," he retorted dryly. "If I'd wanted to turn you in I'd have done so before you were lucid enough to fight back."

The atmosphere in the room suddenly dropped significantly, decidedly frosty, and he rolled his eyes. "Call off your ship," he said with amusement. "I told you already, I've not chosen a side yet."

"And yet, here you are," the Time Lord murmured thoughtfully.

John fidgeted uncomfortably at the implication. "Look," he finally said hesitantly. "You are in no shape to be doing much of anything, and I have a life to get back to before I'm missed and draw attention to myself. If I'd wanted to turn you in right off I would have long before now; and if you were that worried about your own safety you wouldn't have come to me, or to Molly for that matter, in the first place, nor have allowed me to see this place and live to tell about it." The alien regarded him silently. "If I walk out that door and leave, will you come back someday?"

"You're saying...you want to walk away, and I'm free to go, that you'll not tell your employer we met?" The alien appeared to be entirely mystified by his intimations, which brought a small smile to his lips.

"Basically," he agreed with a shrug. "If you will promise to come back someday and let's have a decent talk - I have questions, and I'm certain you do too. Dinner sometime, perhaps?"

"You are an enigma, John Watson," the Time Lord said, shaking his head. He snapped his fingers, and the doorway reappeared in front of where John stood, poised to leave.

He nodded his thanks, and started through it. "Yes, well. Something tells me you rather _like_ mysteries," he called lightly over his shoulder as a parting shot, and left the Time Lord looking after him thoughtfully.

* * *

(1) Given that the TARDIS changes its internal theme with the different doctors, I merely picked the colors and atmosphere that I associate with Sherlock; there's no particular significance to the color scheme other than my imagination.  
(2) One of my favorite episode's was The Doctor's Wife, as it fit right into my personal headcanon about the TARDIS; this chapter is my own small tribute to the genius of that episode.  
(3) According to my resident Who expert, there is a documented canon mention of a different-from-human-physiology respiratory system.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

"You _dropped_ your phone? Off a Tube platform?" Lestrade asked incredulously over the rim of his coffee mug. "You've got the steadiest gun hand of anybody I know, including the Special Ops boys downstairs!"

"I still have an intermittent tremor in the left one," John replied calmly, shaking the offending appendage for emphasis. "Comes and goes, quite unpredictable."

"That's rotten luck, mate," Anderson offered with a commiserating clap on the shoulder - the right one, he'd learnt the hard way never to touch John on the left. "Happens to the best of us, though."

"Yes, but the best of us usually has money for a replacement mobile," John said with a rueful laugh. He replaced his mug, now rinsed and dried, in the lounge cupboard. "Ring my landline if you need to call me in this week, eh?"

"Speaking of overtime, how's the vanishing-out-of-locked-rooms case coming for you, Lestrade?" Hopkins asked with interest. "Any leads yet? It's been going on now for, what -"

"Six weeks," John supplied absently.

Lestrade rolled his eyes as the others cast the coroner a confused look. "Yes, six," he concurred, giving John a friendly warning elbow. "Mr. Blogger here is going to turn it into the novel of the century once I solve it, isn't that right, John?"

"Oh yes," John agreed blithely, bobbing his head. "I've promised to name a central character after him. The Many Spectacular Adventures of Inspector Gregson or some such rubbish."

A chorus of laughter followed him as he left, grateful to escape the friendly chit-chat that normally amused him but now only served to show how different a direction his life appeared to be heading. It had been just under forty-eight hours since his encounter with the Doctor on the rooftop of St. Bart's, and in that time John had done some intensive research into the past incarnations of the Time Lord and his activities on Earth. He'd been unable to locate and contact any of the Doctor's former Companions, most of whom had disappeared from public view, had files hopelessly encrypted by UNIT or Torchwood, or were now deceased - the last on his list of possible leads, Sarah Jane Smith, had died just that year.

Molly Hooper had been able to give him very little information except that he was a fool if he believed the Doctor meant any harm to anyone, much less the people of Earth. She had been only a girl when her town had been overrun by monsters that only she seemed to realise existed, and only because she had somehow been able to remember them after looking away from them.

"Everyone else forgot them, the minute they looked away," she'd told John with a shiver, the night before over drinks in a pub near John's bedsit. "They were horrible things, and no one seemed to realise they were everywhere, in every home, every business, everywhere you turned 'round. I couldn't understand why no one else could see them, or at least remember them once they turned away."

"The Silence, his eleventh regeneration, the one that was presumed dead for several months," John supplied, remembering the files in Mycroft Holmes's information. "But the Silence were mostly centralised in America, weren't they?"

"No, John," she said in a near-whisper. "That's what they want you to think. They were everywhere. And it took the Doctor years to rid the Earth of them - but he never gave up trying."

"You met him during that time, then."

"I was only a child, but I remember," she answered with a faraway smile. "That's what he called me, you know - the Girl Who Remembered. He looked far different than he does now, it's a bit odd really trying to wrap your mind around the fact that he's a hundred-odd years older and I'm only seventeen or so years older, but -"

"Molly," he interposed patiently.

"Right, yes." She nervously tugged a lock of hair behind her ear, staring down into the glass. "There's not much to tell. I was only ten or eleven at the most. Before he finally banished the Silence he was hiding in some small towns in the South of England. One of those was mine. I found him hiding in a neighbour's barn." A smile twitched at her lips. "He was utterly mad, quite charming, but...very sad."

"Sad, how?" John asked gently.

"I don't know," she murmured. "He...looked as if he'd been so alone for so long...he just looked sad, to my child mind. I can't really explain it." Molly looked up at him, eyes flashing with fierce protectiveness. "He's not a monster, nor is he a danger to anyone, John. If you believe otherwise then you're not the man I thought you were."

John was highly curious now. "And you thought I was...?"

"I can call the Doctor's phone," was the unexpected change of subject, and the girl held up a normal-looking mobile. "He can return the favour, and has only once before this month, in the seventeen years it's been. I must be the only person he knows on Earth right now," she added, trailing off a bit with a look of sadness. "Can you imagine that...only having one friend among almost seven billion people..."

"And he asked you about me? Just from a run-in like we had?" John asked incredulously.

"You were trying to chase down a Weeping Angel, John; of course he wanted to know who you were!" Molly said sharply. "You _knew_ too much. It wasn't Mike that set me up with you; I contacted you myself. There are people out there who would like nothing better than to make sure this, his last regeneration, is very short."

"And yet you trusted me enough to call me when he was in trouble, two days ago," he ventured.

She snorted. "I didn't know of anyone else to call, and after I got to know you...I _did_ trust you, to at least give him a chance if nothing else." Molly looked at him, all traces of that girlish innocence vanished in the face of cold, determined protectiveness. "Have you turned him in yet? To your employer?"

John swallowed the remainder of his drink carefully. "No," he finally replied, setting down the empty glass.

Molly had regarded him coolly for a moment, and then had paid for her drinks herself and left the pub. John had remained for longer than was probably wise, given that he had no mobile phone and CCTV cameras were probably all trained on the window in front of which he sat - but he needed to think.

Now, another twenty-four hours later, John was trudging home in the rain, no closer to making a decision than he had been all day.

By the time a black sedan rumbled to a smooth stop beside him on a street corner, he was wet, cold, hungry (he'd forgotten his wallet that morning and only had a packet of crisps in his desk), and in a thoroughly bad mood from mental and moral quandary.

He rather thought he should be forgiven ducking out on his well-intentioned abductors, and said so when the drugs had worn off and he found himself staring across a desk at an entirely unruffled, and entirely unamused, Mycroft Holmes.

"Giving my men the slip I can understand, even resorting to physical violence to avoid this confrontation, John," the man sighed, pouring tea from a steaming pot into two cups on the desk. "But shooting out the tyres on my vehicle? Was that entirely necessary?"

John took the cup with a slightly groggy snarl, and after sniffing it suspiciously decided the caffeine was worth the risk and downed it in two swallows. Hopefully it would clear his head enough to do business with this most dangerous opponent.

"I don't want to talk to you; I've nothing to report," he said flatly.

"Haven't you." The lined brow furrowed slightly as the government official smiled thinly, head cocked to the side. "Curious, that your mobile phone seems to have met with an untimely accident on the very day that our mutual surveillance subject appeared in this timeline for only the second time this year."

So the man was able to track the TARDIS's arrival. John filed that fact away for future protection.

"Pity, that," he said. "Harry gave me that phone...she'll have my head on a pike when she finds out I was so careless." Mycroft's gaze fixed him penetratingly in his chair, but John's eyes betrayed nothing. "Were you trying to phone me, then? I do have a landline. You should know, since you bugged it yourself."

He was baiting a bear, and he knew it, but a hefty dose of the latest knockout drug on the streets accompanied by a lack of sleep and stress did not a healthy combination make.

Mycroft's gaze narrowed to thin pinpoints of ice. "You will find that I tire of games very quickly, Captain," he said with a brittle edge.

"Funny," John drawled, "since you seem to be so fond of chess. _Sir_."

A swallow of tea was the only indication that his employer was doing the civilised equivalent of counting to ten. Then he spoke once more.

"John." The cup was set delicately back in its saucer, and he found himself resisting the urge to fidget under the man's penetrating gaze. "The Doctor is _dangerous_, a very real menace to our society and to the future of the human race. You do not know all of the details of his past, nor shall you ever know. There are things that the world is not yet prepared to hear, history that humanity may never be prepared to be told."

John was silent, and Mycroft continued with a pointed look, "Stories that no one will be prepared to believe. Do you understand my meaning, Doctor Watson?"

It was a transparent enough threat. "Clearly," he answered through a clenched jaw.

"I hope you do." Mycroft rose from his chair, retrieving his umbrella from the back of it. Before he left, he turned, his face in shadow from the dim light behind him. "Think carefully before you act, John. Think _very_ carefully."

For two hours, John sat in silence at a scuffed desk in an empty office building, and did just that.

* * *

Another week passed, during which Molly Hooper pointedly avoided him and another man disappeared mysteriously from a London residence. Even when John pointed out that the house was adjacent an old church yard, and that there were photographs that indicated a statue was gone from the cemetery after the fellow vanished, Lestrade dismissed his theory as nonsense, going so far as to grow annoyed with John's insistence that they pay attention to the stone angels.

John had gotten himself a new mobile, courtesy of the first Mycroft-given paycheque he'd still not yet spent. He figured he might as well spend the money before the man decided to revoke it (he suspected he had the power to do so). John had only given the number out to the boys at the Yard and Molly, and so the message he received late one evening as he was sitting at his desk, blogging away, quite surprised him.

**Unknown Number**  
_4th disappearance = failed assassination. 2nd attempt tonight. Speed is of the essence. The game is on, John!_

He realised at once that the fourth disappearance in Lestrade's case was the one in which a random guest at a party vanished in the middle of a crowded house, the one he suspected was a botched attempt from one of Mycroft's Angels, and the one during which he'd met the Doctor for the first time.

John had no idea why Mycroft would be sending him a message like this, but then he had no idea who else would have sent it from an unknown number. Certainly not Lestrade, he would have signed his name or given more details - or just ignored the tip at all, since he was unconvinced of the entire angel angle.

_Who is this?_ he typed back quickly, though he was already getting into his coat.

He received no answer, which was unsurprising, but snatched up his gun, keys, and mobile before setting off down the hall with more speed than usual - his leg was already starting to cease its infernal ache in the heady rush of adrenaline that began building deep inside him.

He was probably walking straight into a trap, though it was entirely possible that there was a spy in Mycroft's offices who was simply tired of the alien race being used to pick off the population one by one, desirable or no. It could be a legitimate tip, certainly, but it could also be someone trying to lure out the lure - or he could simply be one of several traps and baits being spread out across the city to entice the Doctor in.

Either way, he thought darkly as he slunk through the darkness of a misty London night, he would be prepared.

* * *

The house in which the fourth victim had disappeared was dark save for a light in a downstairs window - the back bedroom, if he remembered the layout of the house correctly. It was not yet ten, and the flickering shadows playing across the blinds indicated a television program just wrapping up, the occupant of the room probably already in bed watching.

The surrounding area was nearly silent, only the whisper of a wet breeze blowing in and a faint sound of distant music thumping in a flat nearby breaking the stillness. John crept around the side of the house, certain that the angel would be exiting into the darkened alley and back garden rather than into a street well-lit with street lamps. He was an expert at camouflage and covert activity, thankfully, and made not a sound to warn either the occupant or anyone else who might be lurking about. Taking shelter behind a clump of bushes and a half-full rubbish bin, he settled in to wait and watch; there was nothing that would induce him to walk blithely into such an obvious trap, were this one.

His patience was rewarded after a very wet twenty minutes spent crouching in damp earth and fusty leaves. A shadow, moving too slowly to be an Angel since he could see it, darted along the far side of the house and disappeared toward the front. The small swish of crushed leaves indicated that whoever it was was drawing near John's hiding place, coming nearer by the moment. Either it was someone intent on springing a trap for the Doctor, or else it was someone after John himself; and either way, the man was in for a slight surprise.

John had not yet moved a muscle, patiently waiting, fingers flexing in readiness. And when the dark figure crept silently past his hiding place, he pounced.

A swift elbow to the solar plexus ensured that the wind was sufficiently knocked out of his opponent to prevent an outcry, and despite something sharp being flailed wildly at his face, nearly taking out his left eye, it was the work of a few short moments for John to be kneeling on the fellow's back, his right arm and neck in a headlock from which he was not going to escape without dislocating his shoulder very painfully or risking asphyxiation.

"Make a sound, and you are a dead man," he whispered cheerfully, close to the fellow's ear, half-buried as it was under a shock of thick hair. He received a pained grunt, muffled into the dirt, in return, as his prisoner shifted futilely under his solid weight. "You should know better than to try to ambush a soldier," he added in some annoyance, because really it was a horrendously amateurish job all round.

His prisoner shifted, quietly spat out a mouthful of leaves, and turned his head to one side, wheezing softly. "Nnargh," the man mumbled, heaving for air. "John, you idiot!"

He froze, not loosening his grip, but bent a bit closer to look at his opponent. The moon was hazy, covered by a film of clouds, and in the shadows he could not see properly to identify the man he was holding.

Then what little light there was glinted off a silvery object lying in the mud - probably what had nearly cost him an eye tonight - to his left, and he peered at it for a moment before recognition hit him.

"Doctor?" he hissed, annoyed.

"No, Dalek Khan. _Yes_, John! Now will you kindly stop trying to rip my arm from my body and _get off me_?" the man groaned, flexing the fingers of his right hand with a wince.

John released the alien's arm and neck, slowly moving off the thin body he'd trapped against the ground. The Time Lord released a tremendous and dramatic cough, before heaving himself to his feet like a living rag doll from a child's television program.

John found himself impaled on a glare that could have peeled paint. "You almost killed me," the alien accused grumpily.

He rolled his eyes, using his shoe to flick the man's odd silver tool up in the air. Catching it with one hand, he handed it over. "Like I said, you should know better. Are you responsible for luring me here, then? Don't tell me aliens bother to text."

"I _prefer_ to text," The Doctor scoffed, pocketing the instrument without a second glance. "And besides, you people have no idea. You think a microwave oven is the greatest invention known to mankind." (1)

"Not to mankind, just bachelor mankind," John replied absently, peering around the bush to see if anyone had heard their quiet scuffle.

He heard a high-pitched snort of laughter, quickly muffled, and then the tall alien was hulking over him, obviously having no concept of being 'in someone's bubble'.

"Do you mind?"

"Mind what?" His companion absently pushed down on John's head with one hand, to better see the back door of the house. John's eyes crossed upward disbelievingly, in an effort to see the thin fingers that were so disregarding of his height and personal space.

"Forget it," he muttered, grinning despite himself at the alien's utter cluelessness. He was about to make some snarky comment about the Doctor's dramatic-hero-coat having grass stains on it, when the door of the house creaked.

As one, they flattened themselves against the side of the house, well hidden in shadow, but there was no sound from the house itself.

The Doctor looked at him, and held a finger to his lips. John rolled his eyes at the unnecessary gesture, and then peered around the corner.

And then clapped a hand over his mouth to muffle the yell of fright as he came face-to-face with a snarling stone figure. He somehow, out of pure self-preservational reflex, remembered to keep his eyes open and frozen on the statue.

A moment later a hand landed solidly on his shoulder. "Ooooh, that's a bit not good. Right, I'm looking at it so you can blink now, John," calm instructions issued into his ear. "And now take a step backward. I'm still looking at it. Step...and again. Now keep your eyes on it while I blink, John."

John was running on auto-pilot by now, blinking when told and trying to not think about it when not. They edged backward slowly from the stone figure, but eventually had to turn the corner of the house to reach a main road.

It was the work of only a second, but the angel had followed, claw-like arms outstretched, mouth distorted in a snarl of rage.

John gulped, blinking on cue and then keeping his gaze on the thing while the Doctor edged them toward the street.

"Well, the good news is, it's probably just had a good meal so to speak, if it completed its job inside the house," the Doctor chirped breathlessly.

"Meaning?"

"It won't be trying to send one of us back in time, it doesn't need the temporal energy right now. Right, blink now, I'm watching it."

"That's good," John breathed.

"No, that's bad," the Doctor corrected. "Blink. Now keep your eyes on it, let me lead you backward."

"That's bad?" he asked, voice rising with an edge of hysteria. "As in how bad?"

"Bad as in, it knows who I am and the TARDIS is a never-ending source of energy for its kind. It's going to be after my ship."

"But not us?"

"No, it'll probably just kill us," the alien agreed cheerfully. "Quickly and relatively painlessly, too. So that's good!"

John no longer wondered if the alien were a madman; now he _knew_, and said so in no uncertain terms. The Doctor just laughed maniacally, carefully pulling him toward the road but keeping their eyes on the stone figure beside the house.

"All I need is to get a good aim at it now," he muttered, ignoring John's increasingly distraught questions. "Keep your eyes on it - John!"

"I _had_ to blink, you didn't warn me!" he hissed, frozen petrified at the knowledge that he'd allowed the thing to get within two yards of them in, literally, the blink of an eye. He could see the malevolence on its face, the mindless evil in its empty stone eyes.

"Well for heaven's sake don't do it again, you utter imbecile!"

"Hurry up then!" John snapped in an angry whisper. A whirring noise from behind him made him want to turn his head, but he resisted the urge. "What are you doing? And what is that, anyway?"

"Sonic screwdriver, and I am trying to find the right setting, I haven't had much cause to use it lately," the Doctor muttered, accompanied by a series of chirps and beeps before another, higher-pitched whirr sounded. "There we go! Hold still now, unless you'd like to be trapped in close quarters with it," he said, and a moment later a loud whine screeched into John's left ear from the silver instrument the man held.

John winced, but did not move, nor took his eyes off the figure. A sudden blueish haze surrounded the stone monster, a fluctuating pulse of energy covering it on all sides.

"Temporal stasis field," the Doctor explained, tossing the instrument up in the air and catching it in one hand. "Best way I've found to get rid of them. It'll hold until I get the TARDIS around it, then I can dump it on a deserted planet somewhere halfway across the universe."

John looked at him incredulously. "And that's easier than just strapping a block of Semtex to it or shoving it off a high building onto a cement pavement?"

The Doctor stared at him in what was presumably horror. "You humans are such a bloodthirsty species, really," he said with a sigh, shaking his head. "Hopeless, the lot of you."

"It's called self-preservation," John retorted, jerking a thumb toward the angel, "and besides, how is that bloodthirsty or murderous when technically the thing doesn't even exist in this dimension when it's in that form?"

The alien blinked for a moment.

"And didn't you smash the first one in that very alley back there, the first night we met?" John demanded.

"Certainly not!" the Doctor snapped, glaring daggers at him. "I knew nothing about it until you showed me a piece of what I presumed to be a very young, possibly not entirely corporeal angel. I assumed you had destroyed it!"

"Me and what wrecking ball?" John retorted. "I'm a police coroner!"

"And a paid spy for the government that hired these very assassins?" the Time Lord sneered.

Fury flooded John's mind, but even as a response formed on his lips a new thought suddenly occurred to him, and he halted, brain working furiously. "Wait..." he said suddenly, and though the Time Lord was still sneering at him the man paused, frowning, to listen. "If what you say is true, and these Angels are one of the most dangerous beings in the universe and they're not alive as we understand it...what use would they have for money?"

The Doctor stopped, head cocked to one side. "Meaning?"

"I don't see how Mycroft Holmes is controlling them," John thought aloud. "They don't need money, and so I doubt he actually hired them in your technical meaning of the word."

"John, really, must you be so dense," his companion sighed, rolling his eyes. "Payment does not have to be monetary. Obviously your employer promised them something they thought worth the humiliation of working for a human, however genius the man might be."

John's blood suddenly ran cold. "I _have_ been played," he whispered, the words and their cold reality shattering his fragile self-peace.

"Of course you have," The Doctor snorted, busily working at his sonic screwdriver. "You are nothing more than bait in a trap for me, John. Or have you only just now deduced that?"

The harshness of the truth was painful, and his horror must have shown in his eyes, for the alien sighed. "The only thing that would convince a Weeping Angel to work for a human like this, in this type of hired structure, is the promise of an unending supply of temporal energy, John."

"Your ship," he supplied numbly.

"My ship," The Doctor agreed. "You had to have done something worthy of drawing his attention, John, and he merely added you to his plans to lure me back to Earth for the first time in...oh, heavens, probably sixty or seventy of my years."

John dropped his gaze, for while the knowledge was not entirely unexpected it still was painful. The one quality he could never tolerate was that of betrayal, and here he had basically become a traitor himself.

"If it makes you feel any better," The Doctor added, as a familiar groaning and whirring began to grow louder, "I highly doubt you are the only feeler the man has out there, attempting to locate me. Nothing particularly special about you."

"Oh yes, that helps loads with the guilt," he muttered.

"Ehh, guilt. Inconvenient emotion, that. My advice would be to ignore it." The TARDIS shimmered into existence around the frozen angel, and the Doctor darted inside. "I'll be back shortly - wait up for me if you like!" he called as the door slammed, and a moment later the blue box had disappeared, a swirl of leaves settling to the ground the only indication it was ever there in the first place.

John stood for a few moments, uncertainty warring with the desire to do the Right Thing (if he could decide what that was). Obviously the alien didn't hold anything against him, and while John had never fully been in agreement with Mycroft Holmes he was still not entirely innocent of the man's employ. At any rate, he owed the Doctor an apology at the very least, and so he shoved his hands deep into his pockets and huffed lightly, rocking back and forth as he waited for the Time Lord to reappear.

He would have been willing to remain far longer than two or three minutes, since he suspected the fellow had only a fleeting grasp of the concept of punctuality, except that a snap of twigs to his right, close to the neighbour's shrubbery, drew his attention. Expecting to see a cat slinking along in the lamp-dotted night, he turned his head.

And then froze, his jaw clenching shut and a chill of instinctive terror freezing the blood in his veins.

Evidently the Weeping Angel that the Doctor had just carted off to heaven-knew-where...had a _mate_.

* * *

(1) "I prefer to text" is from the BBC version of Sherlock. Anything else in this chapter's dialogue that sounds familiar most likely is.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

John's first thought was a hysterical whimper of _could his life possibly get any worse?_, followed shortly by the more hysterical thought regarding the mechanics of such a species mating and reproducing...

Then his brain caught up with his reflexes and he began to forcibly slow his breathing, calm his twitching eyes - which had immediately wanted to blink rapidly, despite not needing to - and think.

"Okay, right," he breathed, eyes firmly fixed on the leering stone figure. "Basic residential area, no hope of outside intervention, alien that can move faster than the speed of light. Half a moment..." Why were there two of them, anyway? They'd never worked in pairs before, and he and the Doctor had caught the assassin who presumably had taken care of the occupant of the empty house in front of him.

They'd never worked in pairs before, in fact were called "the lonely assassins." Which meant that each angel had its own target, presumably. And...

Oh, God.

The realisation hit him like a tonne of brick, and he resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands with despair.

He'd outlived his usefulness to Mycroft Holmes.

"You couldn't've just sacked me, could you," he murmured, trying to ignore the shaking which had started in his extremities. He stood, carefully blinking one eye at a time, no doubt looking like a right idiot but at least an alive idiot, and hoped against hope that at any moment he would hear the very welcome sound of the TARDIS engines as she brought the Doctor back.

No such luck, and after another minute or two of standing still, staring at an angel statue, even his iron nerve began to break. Right, well. He began to slowly edge backward on the gravel path to the back door, scant inches at a time, aware that any misstep or stumble would mean his death. _Think, John_, he thought furiously. _All those files, and there is no way to get rid of the things other than to trick two of them into staring at each other?_

The house behind him was likely empty now, he thought rationally, and at least if he could lure the angel inside it would eliminate the risk that an innocent passer-by would fall victim to its touch of death or time-travel. He belatedly hoped, as he edged backward another few steps, finally bumping against the back doorstep, that he would at least be sent back to a relatively pleasant era of time, not smack into the Spanish Inquisition or the Battle of Britain.

He caught himself too late and had blinked, during which the angel reappeared at the corner of the house, only a few yards away now. Cursing his poor luck, he edged up the doorstep and fumbled behind him. A quick wrench at the doorknob sticking into his back proved the door to have been left ajar at the first Angel's exit, and a nudge with his elbow pushed it open. He carefully blinked each eye separately again, and slowly began to edge backward into the house.

Finally, when he could only barely see the angel through the crack in the door, he braced himself and, faster than he'd ever moved in his life, slammed and locked the door. It wouldn't hold the thing, not for long, but at least it would gain him a few minutes to try to think of a plan.

He darted through the kitchen and locked that door behind him as well, just as he heard a sickening smash of wood from the outer door - obviously the door was no deterrent to an otherworldly creature made of solid stone! Pelting up the stairs as fast as he could, he fumbled his mobile out of his pocket and, taking a wild chance, hit the redial button on his last text message.

The phone rang out, unfortunately, though he had hardly hoped that the Doctor would actually be able to pick it up, wherever the man was.

Another smash behind him told him that the Angel was not wasting time about following him, and he breathlessly locked a hall door behind him and shoved a nearby desk chair under the knob, before continuing down an all-too-short hallway to what looked like the master bedroom.

He slammed that door as well and whirled to face it, redialling with a shaking hand.

"Taking a chance here, Doctor," he finally hissed into the generic voice-mail that answered after the usual six rings. "There's another one, and it's been sent after me! I'm in the house and - " his breath caught as a splintering sounded at the end of the hall. "And it's in here! It's in here with me! For the love of heaven come back, Doctor! It -"

The bedroom door shattered as if it were no more than pasteboard, and he dodged to avoid several large shards of wood that flew at his head. He dropped the phone in the process but did, however, have the presence of mind to not foolishly dive after it. Rather he remained in his half-sprawled position, staring resolutely at the monster that filled the small doorway, frozen by his determined gaze.

"Don't blink, just don't blink," he whispered through clenched teeth, trying to steady his panicked breathing. "You'll be fine if you just don't blink."

John slowly rose to his feet, trying to peer at the stone figure without looking directly at its twisted features. "What I wouldn't give for a chisel or something," he muttered, wracking his brain for any ideas as to how to destroy or at least incapacitate the thing. The house had no pets to aid him in looking at the thing, though he wouldn't want to depend on a cat staring at the statue anyway...jumping out a window might deter it momentarily but he would likely be in no shape to further run from it...if he hacked the arms off, would it be able to touch him and send him back in time? Certainly it wouldn't be able to strangle him at least...

Though, he thought with a shiver, he really had no desire to get close enough to it to try injuring it. And besides, he could hardly search for a weapon without taking his eyes off it.

He stood it for a good two or three minutes, but nerves and painful itchiness won out over his determination, and he did blink at one point, realising his mistake just a moment too late. He instantly scrambled backward then, eyes carefully wide, as the stone angel was now scant inches in front of him, arms outstretched - so close he could see the stone teeth bared in a predatory snarl.

He had stumbled backward into what he assumed was the master bath, since it was a tiled floor and he could smell the scents of shampoo and soap - but again, it was unlikely to hold anything which would help him survive the next few minutes. Human nature is to do that which it knows it must not, and already his eyes were itching horribly, watering as moisture welled up because he refused to more than wink one of them at a time.

Something thudded downstairs, and for a fleeting moment he had a flash of hope that the Doctor had returned - but he had not heard the TARDIS's engines, and so the hope died as soon as it had flared. He was really and truly on his own, and Mycroft Holmes had sent a Weeping Angel to dispose of him. An assassin against which there literally was no defence.

It was only the deserved fate of a traitor, he mused bitterly, as he inched backward into the small master bath.

He'd just about given up, and was going to close his eyes and just wish that he would land in a period of time where they at least had running water, when a faint, wild hope occurred to him.

If it didn't work, he was basically a dead man - but then he was that anyway, now; so what had he to lose?

He edged backward until he found the sink with his questing hands. He stood to one side, and took a deep breath, then blinked as quick as ever he could. In that instant, the angel moved inside the lavatory door, and was now scant inches from him. It took a bit of manoeuvring, and a few seconds of hair-raising dodging around the tiny bathroom, but eventually he had the angle he wanted, and he took one last deep breath to calm himself before risking his neck - or his future - in a desperate gamble.

And finally, wedged between the sink and the shower, he faced the angel. After one last faint prayer for mercy, he broke eye contact and dropped to the ground, wedging himself under the sink amidst the exposed plumbing in as quick a gesture as he could manage.

Stone robes remained bare inches from his nose - but did not move any closer.

Did not move at all, in fact, even when he glanced away briefly and then back again.

He inhaled a shaking breath, aware that he was trembling all over with the closeness of the call, and half-wondered if it were a trick.

Then something crashed in the house beyond, and a very welcome voice, high-pitched with panic, shouted his name loud enough to wake the entire housing block.

"John! John, where are you?"

"In here," he shouted, trying to wriggle out from under the sink, no easy feat due to his way being blocked on three sides by walls and a Weeping Angel. "The master bath!"

Another crash as the Doctor tripped over something in the bedroom, followed by a thud and a muffled "Ow." John squeezed out from under the sink, wincing as his head scraped against a sharp piece of exposed plumbing, and finally was able to scramble up from the tiled floor. The Time Lord came flying around the corner, wild-eyed, and jerked to a halt as he saw the monster standing in front of the sink.

Slumped against the nearest wall, John looked down at his shaking hands and absently wondered if he was going into shock. Because really, Weeping Angels were a completely different type of trauma than exploding bombs and a hail of sniper bullets and how was he going to explain that kind of PTSD to his therapist because she was hardly going to believe him since he wouldn't believe himself, and how on earth had his idea worked anyway and why in the name of sanity was the Doctor edging up to the frozen angel and curiously poking it in the head like that?

Apparently satisfied, the alien whirled on his heel and in a movement so quick John nearly jumped out of his skin the Doctor had both gloved hands practically mashing the sides of his head, speaking scant inches from his face. "All right?" he demanded, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was Not Done to just grab a bloke's head like that and probably try to read his mind! "John, _are you all right_?"

He shook his head in agitation, pulling free, and the alien released him as he muttered a shaky affirmative, only to then grasp the Time Lord's arm as his knees chose that moment to buckle amid the flood of relief washing over him.

"It's all right," the man said in a surprisingly soothing tone, helping him sit on the edge of the bathtub. "It's okay, John. Anyone would be scared out of their wits, there's just something about the species that engenders an instinctual terror in anyone, any age."

John didn't bother to thank him or agree, only nodded curtly, taking a deep breath as he finally took a good look at his would-be assassin.

"I have to ask," the Doctor finally said curiously, as he flipped his coat-tails out of the way and gingerly perched beside him on the lip of the tub. "What gave you that idea?" He gestured at the frozen angel, and then peered with interest at John. "How in the world did you think of that?"

"What, the sink mirror?" John ran a hand unsteadily through his close-cropped hair, giving a shaky sort of laugh. "Molly's cat, actually."

"Ms. Hooper's...cat?"

John chuckled at his clueless incredulity. "Smokes hates her hall closet because the doors are made of those sliding mirrors. Every time he comes around the corner he thinks there's another cat standing there threatening him." The Time Lord's eyes lit up suddenly with realisation, and John nodded. "That which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel, and I was gambling on the idea that I could trick it into thinking another angel was looking at it. If I understand things correctly, it creates a sort of quantum paradox?" (1)

The Time Lord was silent for a long moment, staring at him with such an intense gaze that he found himself wanting to squirm with unease, before the alien shook himself out of his reverie and fairly bounced to his feet, clapping his hands with glee. "Brilliant!" he exclaimed, and John nearly fell into the tub. "John Hamish Watson, you are absolutely, completely, and utterly _brilliant_!"

John stood up, more steady on his feet this time, and raised a tolerant eyebrow. "Because I used a mirror to stop the thing? Surely in all your centuries of experience I'm not the only one to think of that."

"Er...actually, yes. You are the first," The Doctor admitted with a sheepish grin. "It never occurred to me, in fact." At John's sceptical look, he bristled, flipping his collar up and hunching into it defensively. "Well I don't just carry mirrors about with me, you know!" he sniffed. "And it is a bit hard for a mind like mine to come up with such a hideously mundane solution!"

"Yes, yes, you should have quit while you were ahead," John snorted, elbowing the alien genially in the side as he scooted out of the bathroom (quite enough looking at the frozen angel, thank you). "What are we going to do with it?"

"Leave it for now," The Doctor declared, following him, John thought rather like an excited puppy not wanting to lose sight of a new master. "Our mutual acquaintance in the government will not be happy that it failed to serve its purpose, and he will no doubt locate and dispose of it as he did the one which failed to dispatch this house's original target. My stasis field setting hasn't had time to recharge yet, so there's very little I can do with it at the moment."

"Good," John breathed, climbing over the remains of the ruined door. "Dinner?"

The Time Lord eyed him warily. "What."

"I'm starving," John replied patiently. "There's bound to be an all-night Chinese around here somewhere; are you hungry? Or does your species have something against lo mein and fortune cookies?"

"Fortune cookies are boring," the alien declared loftily. "I can nearly always predict them."

"Not a very impressive feat for a _Time Lord_."

"Yes, well. Hrm."

"I don't suppose you have any Earth money?"

"If I were you, I'd start spending my Holmes-given paycheque before the man empties your bank account, considering he intended you to be in a different century by this time of the evening."

"Good idea."

"Mine usually are. Oh, and you might want to get your superfluous cane out of the back garden; would be a bit hard to explain if your incompetent friends at the Yard found it whenever they finally investigate."

* * *

The Doctor was a bizarrely finicky eater, John discovered through the course of their meal, nibbling one thing and then another with a haphazard attention that bespoke of very little time spent sitting down and eating with a dining companion. John tried to ignore the alien in favour of filling his stomach, but drew the line when he reached over and appropriated John's last egg roll.

"Oi, stop that," he said indignantly, smacking the retreating hand with the back of his unused spoon. "Get your own. Or is that some weird alien friendship ritual I'm not aware of, stealing off people's plates?"

The Time Lord looked down his aristocratic nose and rolled his eyes. "I don't have _friends_, John," he stated severely. (2) "Friends are a hindrance, a distraction, to a well-ordered mind. I have no time for trivialities."

"Yes, well, I wonder _why_ you don't have any," John snorted, swiping his egg roll back. "I thought you used to travel with a whole entourage of them at one point, though?" he inquired over the rim of his water glass. "There are pages and pages of files in the records about your 'companions'..."

"I have not travelled with a companion in over seventy years, John," the alien fairly snapped, in a tone that made him immediately mark the subject as very Not Good.

"Yes, all right, there's no need to get shirty about it," he said mildly. "It's your business, not mine, if you like being on your own."

"Alone is what I have. Alone protects me."

"No, friends protect people, but I couuuuuld just be biased, considering I was nearly offed by a Weeping Angel tonight." The Time Lord's eyes narrowed suspiciously at him, and John assumed his most guileless expression of innocence. "Look, all I was saying was that - there's nothing wrong with being unattached, okay? Just like me. It's fine. Good, even."

Comprehension dawned in the alien's eyes, shortly followed by an uncomfortable look of dismay. "Ah...John. I think you should know that I consider myself in a relationship with my TARDIS, and while I'm flattered by your interest, I -"

"No, no, for pity's sake no," John choked out from around the last bite of egg roll. A relationship with the T...he really did _not_ want to know, he decided. "That is not what I meant, Doctor. I was only just...making conversation. You know, that _thing_ people do when they are trying to learn more about one another?"

"Dull," was the laconic response, though the man had relaxed at John's hasty correction of his false assumption. "How _do_ you humans stand your own banality?"

"We don't know any better," John drawled. "Well, go on," he continued, tossing a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie across the table. "Predict my fortune, Mr. Time Lord."

The alien looked at him very curiously, unaccountably making John want to squirm in his chair. "What?" he asked sullenly, crunching down on the last of the chow mein in an effort to distract himself.

"You are a very odd human, John Watson," the Time Lord murmured, fiddling with the plastic around the fortune cookie. "Most of your kind have enough sense to recognise that I am a dangerous man, and yet here you sit, without a care that I've been guilty of destroying worlds all across the universe."

"And I've been part of several campaigns that destroyed villages and contingents in Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm a _real_ doctor who has killed men young enough to be my children - yet you don't condemn me for _my_ choices," John responded. "How fair would that be?"

He received a very brief, but genuine smile. "Most humans don't seem to think like you do, John."

"Mm. That's because they're idiots." Meal finished, he settled back with a pleased sigh, and grinned at The Doctor's confusion. "Well, go on, dazzle me," he said with a wave, indicating the fortune cookie.

The Time Lord seemed to relax a bit, tension leeching from his uncomfortably awkward posture as he slowly unwrapped the cookie, regarding it with a deliberation that John was willing to bet was more parts melodramatic theatricality than genuine concentration.

"Hmm...let's see, I believe this one will be, ah, something to the effect of..." the alien glanced up, and his piercing blue eyes widened enormously. "You need to get out of here, now."

John raised an eyebrow. "Bit ominous for a fortune cookie, don't you think?" he asked mildly.

"No, John," The Doctor hissed, and leaned forward to point toward the front windows of the restaurant. "I mean _you really need to get out of here, now_!"

John's blood ran cold at the sight of not one but three long black cars illegally parking along the kerb, in the empty bus loading zones.

He struggled hastily into his jacket, cursing the day he ever met Mycroft Holmes. "You've got to come with me," he hissed impatiently, as the man opposite made no move to rise. "Do you have any idea what will happen to you if they catch you?"

"Better me than you, John; I at least stand a decent chance of escaping them. However brilliant, they are just human -"

"You bloody self-sacrificing idiot, he's obviously got a tracker on me somewhere, so you won't be helping _me_ a bit by giving yourself up!" John swore roundly, and finally just hauled the thinner man bodily out of the booth by his blue scarf.

The Doctor's strangled yelp drew the attention of the nearby customers, but that was the least of their concerns as they darted through the sparse groups of late-night diners, headed for what John assumed was the kitchen door.

Scarcely had they reached it when behind them, the cheap bell on the restaurant's front door rang, indicating an entrance. The swinging kitchen door clunked against John's heels as they barrelled through, and a distant shout told them the game was up.

The Doctor glanced over at him, and smirked, a manic light of glee glowing in his eyes.

"Run!"

Grinning, John darted after him like a bolt from a crossbow.

* * *

(1) I don't think the mirror idea has been done before, at least I and my beta were unable to locate a fic where it has been, so hopefully I get points for originality. It just seems to be the most overlooked and simple solution, to me. :)  
(2) The majority of this restaurant scene is either directly quoted or adapted for my purposes from ASIP; anything you recognise does not belong to me.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

They dashed through the streets of London, lost at least eight of their pursuers (who were obviously recruited from somewhere other than the headquarters of Mycroft's last kidnap intentionists, because they were actually quite good this time 'round), and finally ditched the last two smack in the middle of Piccadilly Circus by what the Doctor explained in a whisper to be a 'layered perception filter,' and which John renamed a _cloaking device_. He then had to explain, also in a whisper, the basic concepts of the Star Trek universe.

"Ridiculous," the Time Lord scoffed, bundling his coat tightly about him as a breeze whipped up. "Vulcan is a half-volcanic, half-gaseous planet, and the only sentient thing that lives there is a very peculiar species of enormous insect that derives its sustenance by burrowing into -"

"Wait, wait - Vulcan is a _real planet_?" John was still stuck on that point, ignoring the lecture on universal ecology.

"Not in your galaxy, but yes," the alien said, waving him off impatiently. "We can discuss this tedious penchant for human pop culture another time, John. Right now - ah, there! You see?" Two men in dark coats had been joined by a third and had melted into the throng of late night Londoners. Now they were systematically - expertly, for they were not drawing anyone's attention save John and his companion's - surveying the crowd.

"Can they find us, under this...filter, thing?"

"Not without a multiplicitous universal life-form scanner," The Doctor replied absently, fiddling with his sonic screwdriver. "D'you suppose they've got one?"

"Ah...considering that I have no idea what you even just said...not a clue."

"Sorry. I do that, you know." A half-shy grin twitched at the alien's thin lips. "Babble on about things, I mean. You mustn't mind me if I do that. I make up for it by not speaking a word for days on end sometimes, just to break up the monotony."

"...Right." John eyed one of the men, who was drawing dangerously close to their position, namely strolling along the pavement behind a family with two screaming children. The man suddenly halted, and stared straight at them. "Ah...does your perception filter disrupt signals from tracking devices?" he suddenly asked.

"It should," the alien said worriedly, edging them around the young family toward a darker side street. "It should blanket all wavelengths of any type, unless..."

"Unless Mycroft knows you'd try that and has his people prepared for it?" John's voice rose in pitch as the three men in black began slowly but systematically honing in on their direction.

John heard a mumbled word that probably was an expletive in Time-Lordian, whatever their language was...Gallifryan? Or something like that, he vaguely remembered from Mycroft's files. Then the Doctor banged the sonic screwdriver irritably against his opposite hand, growling at it.

"Blasted thing hasn't been the same since I dropped it down a mine shaft on Exetor," he muttered in annoyance as it fizzled and made an angry spurting noise. "This is not a good time, not good at all," he continued in a slightly tense sing-song, waving the object around and nearly taking John's eye out.

"Ah...Doctor," John began nervously, as he saw their position become perfectly triangulated among their three pursuers.

"Right, well, it's having problems, okay?" the Time Lord cried in frustration. "It's been almost a century since I was on this pathetic little planet, it probably doesn't like the pollution in your atmosphere or something!"

"Great," John muttered. "Lovely. Ah...let's see. Have you any alien tech that will let you counterfeit an Oyster card? I have no cash and getting a cab this late is hard enough anyway...and I'll bet anything Mycroft has my cards blocked by now. That's probably how he tracked us, in fact! I used my chip-and-pin to pay for the food. I should have _thought_ of that!"

"Oh, stop dithering. Yes, I could manage an Oyster card well enough, have before in fact, ridiculously clumsy way to travel, those infernal buses, except when they're flying, and that was an experience to remember, but - John!" John ignored the man's yelp as he grabbed a gloved hand and fairly yanked him down the closest Tube entrance, melting into a large crowd of raucous party-goers.

"Oh, I quite like you," The Doctor said admiringly, as they fairly flew through the turnstiles along with a stream of others and slipped onto a train that was just preparing to leave. "How many times have you done this, out of curiosity?" he inquired, as they shot out of the station, leaving their pursuers still wandering on the platform.

"What, run for my life from hired assassins, arm-in-arm with an alien?"

"Given someone the slip so efficiently...Army, yes, medic, yes, but you're far too good to be basic RAMC. Special ops?"

"Of a kind," John replied evasively, because he was not in the mood to discuss his service or debate its morals at the moment, especially with an alien of The Doctor's past.

Thankfully the Time Lord appeared to know when to quit, and did so, only leaned curiously against a pole. John unzipped his coat, glad that there were only two other occupants in the car and both were deeply engrossed in their iPods, and stepped closer to him. "Can your...screwdriver, thing, detect where the tracking device is Mycroft planted on me?" he asked in a hushed tone. "Because we've got to get it off me and leave it somewhere."

"I thought you said he was more likely to track your chip-and-pin, whatever that is," was his companion's puzzled reply.

"Yes, but he rarely leaves anything to chance; I'm sure there's another way he's able to locate me. Besides, I didn't receive any packages containing angel statues in the post and so there had to be some way to sic an assassin on me earlier tonight," John pointed out.

The Doctor cast a glance over his shoulder at the oblivious teenagers at the other end of the car, and then pulled out his sonic device, changing a setting. The blue penlight whirred slowly over John's body from head to toe, and then back again toward his midsection. Finally it chirped, and The Doctor gave a hrmph of satisfaction.

"It's in my belt buckle?" John hazarded.

"Er...no, it does not appear to be located on your person."

"But that thing, it blipped -"

"It appears to be _inside_ your person," the alien continued, trying to hide a grin of mischief. "What _have_ you been eating, John?"

His look of disgusted disbelief sent the Time Lord off into a fit of sniggering, muffled into his voluminous scarf. "Are you serious," John growled, reactively peering down at his stomach. "I only have pot noodles and tea bags in my apartment! How the -" He swayed as the train came to a halt, and moved closer to The Doctor as the teenagers squeezed past them and slouched out the doors, leaving them in the car alone. He finally flopped down into a seat and groaned, planting his face in his hands. "Why does my life have to be so _bizarre_?"

"No idea," the alien pondered, sitting beside him and stretching long legs out in front of them. "But this could be problematic, a bit."

"You think?" John raised his head, incredulity deepening the worry lines around his eyes. He groaned again and leaned back, head banging uncaringly against the window. The doors shut, and the train began to move again. "Ugh, okay. Think. How long will it take me to eliminate it..."

"That's something I can't really estimate without knowing far too much personal information about your hygienic habits, John."

"Rhetorical, Doctor!"

"Right...well. Yes." An awkward clearing of throat. "We shan't be able to run indefinitely, you know."

_Who the blue blazes says shan't anymore?_ John wondered, shaking his head, but ultimately agreed. "We'd better split up then," he sighed at last. "You get as far away from London as you can, and -"

"Wrong," the Time Lord interrupted cheerfully. "For one, as far away as I could get would mean a trip across the cosmos, and the old girl's not quite in condition to make another run like that just yet with any accuracy. And for another, you know you've outlasted your usefulness to the man. As soon as he finds you, it's a hired assassin and pfffft - _back to the past_ for John Watson."

"Yes, charming, thank you," he muttered testily. "Couldn't have worked that out on my own. I've always wanted to meet William the Conqueror, so lovely! Why not?"

The Doctor's eyes sparked with interest. "Have you really?"

"No!" John exclaimed in vexation. "I just want to -" he broke off suddenly, because he quite honestly had no idea how to finish that sentence. His life was rather boring at present, this lovely little detour into the realm of the X-Files the most diversion he'd had - and the most alive he'd felt - since returning from active duty. "Right now, I'd just like to survive the night," he finally sighed, shifting uneasily in the hard seat.

"Yes, well, that's a reasonable enough goal." The Doctor peered at the scrolling marquee, which indicated their next stop. "How do you propose to outrun your employer during that time, is the question. Or do you plan to outrun him?"

John shot him a quick look. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Come now," his companion replied, unperturbed, "you can't deny it must have crossed your mind that you could probably get back in his good graces and save yourself by turning me in, even after this delay."

He felt a blush creep up his neck, because it had certainly dangled before him as an attractive method of self-preservation. "It did cross my mind," he admitted, shrugging without reservation. "Self-preservation instincts of a soldier and all that. But there's more at stake here than just my neck - literally, if one of the victims was an innocent bystander who really did get killed by an Angel," he added with grim humour. "I could run and possibly even save myself, but that isn't going to prevent the man from continuing to use the Weeping Angels as his own personal little task force."

The Doctor peered at him with honest curiosity. "Why would you care?" he queried, with a puzzled tilt of head.

John blinked. "Why would I care if he's using an alien race to pick off London citizens one by one?" he repeated disbelievingly.

"Yes, why would it bother you?" The Doctor leaned back in his seat, fingers steepled absently in front of his lips as he looked at John reflected in the glass opposite.

"One, that's cold-blooded murder, and -"

"One," accompanied by a thin finger, "those people being assassinated are all what your society deems the worst offenders, and I cannot disagree with that assessment. Traitors to the government, child abusers, human traffickers - come, John, it should appeal to your, shall we say, flexible sense of morality more than to your righteous indignation."

John was silent for a minute, revolving the details in his mind. Finally he exhaled in a long, uncertain breath, and shook his head. "I won't debate that they deserved it, and that it's a uniquely bloodless method of ridding society of people the law can't touch - but what's to stop him from turning his private little task force into picking off people who are just minor annoyances, people he just wants out of the way?"

"People like you," the Time Lord pointed out helpfully.

"Yes! But not just me," John protested. "It could be anyone who gets on his bad side. No one deserves to wield that much absolute power."

"No, but the universe rarely has operated on the principle that people in politics deserve what they get, or get what they deserve for that matter," was the laconic response.

"But regardless of that," John pressed earnestly, "he's using an alien race to do his dirty work for him, willing or no - doesn't that break some sort of universal laws against outworldly interference in our society?" What was it Star Trek called it, the Primary Directive or something?

But the Doctor had shot upright, ramrod straight, and was smiling at him with what was evidently a weird sense of pride. "Perceptive of you, John. Technically yes. I could, in theory, invoke the Shadow Proclamation and they could evict the Weeping Angels from your planet due to Article 59, saying that alien races are not permitted to interfere with the governmental workings of a Level Five planet." (1)

John blinked. "If I understand that Jabberwocky correctly...why don't you just do that, if your people can run them off for us?"

The Doctor hummed non-committally. "Mm, for one, they are not 'my people'; and for another, it is such a tedious thing, dealing with bureaucracy."

"Tell me about it," John muttered. "I'm a police coroner. Hardly the highest on the totem pole."

"Right. Well, it would take rather a long time and effort, you see, to put the matter before the Proclamation Council...and wait for the deliberations...not to mention it takes simply _ages_ to get sorted through their paranoid guard force." The alien sighed lazily, and stretched out his long legs further. "Besides," he drawled laconically, "what is it to me if you stupid little people can't handle your own affairs? You seem to do well enough fighting amongst yourselves over trivialities when over half the world is in poverty, why should I bother to rid one tiny little island nation of internal corruption?"

"In other words, you're too lazy and don't care," John interjected with heat.

"Mm, basically." The Time Lord's half-open eyes blinked to awareness suddenly. "I've disappointed you, haven't I?" he asked, with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.

"Just a bit, yeah," John replied tightly. "Good mind-reading, that."

The Time Lord returned the hard look with cold deliberation. "Don't try to make people into heroes, John. Heroes don't exist, and even if they do - I certainly am not one of them." His gaze narrowed, brooding and morose. "Not anymore." (2)

John stood, hanging onto the pole for balance as the train slowed into the next station, free hand clenched into a fist in his pocket. "And you wonder why I found it hard to choose sides," he said quietly. "In the past, your other incarnations at least tried to minimize damage and save the Earth. But we never saw your twelfth incarnation at all, and this one - I know you aren't human, Doctor, but I didn't peg you for nothing more than a _machine_."

The train pulled to a halt, and the doors opened. He stepped out onto the platform, still shaking his head.

"John, wait!"

Realising he was behaving rather like a teenaged girl storming away in a huff from an intractable parent, he groaned silently, and halted his progress through the nearly-deserted station platform. Even if the alien refused to help him, John reasoned, he had a responsibility to at least try to stop Mycroft Holmes himself - and the safest place for him to make plans to do so, despite their differences, would be with the only remaining Time Lord.

Besides, Captain John Watson had never yet run from a conflict, and he'd no intention of starting now. Sighing resignedly, he turned around to re-enter the Underground car and try to salvage the mess.

He never saw the Weeping Angel emerge from the shadows just behind him.

* * *

(1) This isn't a real legislature, though there are similar ones documented in the Whoniverse (as in the one Eleven cited in his very first episode with Prisoner Zero).  
(2) Dialogue adapted from TGG, with a nod to TRF


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

Cursing himself for the fool he was did nothing to change his predicament, and after fifteen minutes of sheer, unrelenting panic, John finally got hold of himself and was able to take stock of his surroundings without _completely_ freaking out. Three-fourths freaking out, yes, but that was at least an improvement upon the last quarter-hour.

He was still in London, he thought, which made sense; the Angels fed off of potential time, not time _and_ space, if the files were to be believed. But had he not somehow been able to sense that this was still London (it got into your blood, and it just _felt_ different from any other city he'd ever been in), he never would have known it - for what a London it was!

The first thing he noticed was the _sound_. Gone was the occasional drone of aeroplane engines, the roar of buses, the almost constant goading of irritable automobile horns, the clatter and rumble and groan of society having vanished like smoke into the air of this so very foggy night. The crisp excitement that seemed to pervade the city was now dulled, become a murky miasma of oily fog and enough sooty pollution in the air that he was coughing before he'd inhaled in five breaths of it. London - his London - took pride in her title of the 'cleanest city in Europe', and even more so now that everyone was gearing up for the 2012 Olympics - but this! The city was positively _gritty_ with smog and filth and industry, not helped at all by the sickly glow of gaslights flickering and sputtering along the deserted street where he found himself.

A wet, cold wind whipped up about him - obviously, he was near the Thames, and the less hysterical portion of him wondered if they'd built the Tower Bridge yet - blowing an assortment of leaves and litter about his ankles. He quickly stomped on a newspaper spread to prevent its continuance, and then gingerly picked up the soggy item, scanning rapidly for an idea of his current time period (obviously it was wintertime, though a mild winter, and somewhere before electricity and automobiles became in common use).

He was in luck; the paper was the front page of a grotty tabloid, or what had to be this centuries-old equivalent, and it was dated..._4 January, 1881._

John rather thought he could be forgiven sinking down heavily on the dirty kerb in front of him, heedless of the half-frozen slush around his ankles, and trying to keep his panic under wraps.

"Right, okay," he muttered, because honestly he didn't think anyone would look twice or even care if he was overheard talking to himself. "It's only...a hundred and thirty years, give or take a few months. Can't be that horrible of a place. Could definitely be worse, yes, definitely." The thought occurred to him that he'd be lucky to find a place with proper working _plumbing_, and he winced.

A hundred different thoughts jumbled together in his mind, tangled and interwoven among the sense of sheer panic he was fighting. The chiefest of those was horror at the knowledge that he would never see his own time period - if it had been fifty years, he might at least get close despite being decrepit, but this! - and that his friends, mainly Lestrade, would have no idea what had happened to him. He did not much relish the idea of becoming nothing more than a cold case file in his work, thankless though it had been. He could only hope that the Doctor would at least let his colleagues know, anonymously perhaps, what had happened to him; he was quite certain after their last conversation that he'd be receiving no help from that quarter.

His next thought, understandably, was utter frustration, because he had absolutely nothing which would aid him in making his way through this portion of history. His mobile winked a cheerful 'No Signal' at him, and he knew it would shortly die, taking with it his last link to his own time. He had his wallet in his pocket, but nothing in it would help him; his identification was outdated, and without it he would never be able to establish an identity or prove it afterward. He'd no money, no contacts, no prospects, and no hope of doing anything more than just surviving from day to day - how, he had no idea yet.

As if to complete his utter misery, it began to rain - tiny little ice pellets that melted into slush when they struck ground or his person as he scrambled to his feet. Lovely. He couldn't have been dropped into a tropical location, or at least London on a nice summer day, no. But he would not better himself by standing around, and if there was one thing John Watson knew how to do, it was to _survive_.

He shivered, turned his jacket collar up, and strode off into the night.

* * *

Seven days of shifting for himself had given John a brand-new perspective on the homeless which he always had strode by in London with nothing more than a sympathetic look. Sleeping rough was not a hardship, as he was accustomed to frigid desert nights in Afghanistan - but the inability to wash and change clothing, the reliance on others to sustain one's self day to day, to simply feel like a human being, was by far the worst part of those circumstances. He would never be anything but compassionate toward such people again.

He had been lucky on the second day, after an intense wracking his brain to recall his Victorian-era history, to remember that in those days medicine was still a bit antiquated (archaic, in some ways) and physicians some of the most successful people in the business world. While he would need to research 'current' medical trends, and while he would have to be careful not to be seen as a complete nutter or a sorcerer with his too-advanced knowledge - probably no one in the worst parts of the city would ask him for identification and his diploma if he offered his services to a charity clinic or mission. It likely would pay him nothing - but he most likely would be able to barter a bed to sleep on, tatty clothing that at least was of the period, and hopefully one or two square meals a day in exchange for his excellent triage skills.

It was not a thrilling or promising game plan for the rest of his life, but it would at least ensure he didn't die of starvation or exposure while he worked out a method of survival in this barbaric age. And so, on the third day, he set off into the Whitechapel district in search of employment, finding a suitable clinic before night fell. As he'd suspected, any offer of help to the people living in such deplorable conditions was welcomed with open arms and friendly, tired smiles; and if he slipped once in a while and didn't quite make sense to the people of the day, well, no one asked questions. John suspected they would take any help they could get, regardless of medical qualifications.

As he was regarded as one of the most competent surgeons in his field and had battle conditioning, within a month John found that he had been elevated in status among his patients to an almost ridiculous reputation of miracle-working. He spent his nights in the clinic and his days in the British Library, trying to bring himself up to speed in this time period, and he'd been intrigued and fascinated and excited and then horrified by turns as he researched the era. Intrigued and disappointed, to learn that apparently barbaric war in the Middle East was not limited to his own time period. Fascinated by the Victorian stodginess and excited to learn that he would get to experience the only other Diamond Jubilee in British history firsthand. Excited to read literature of best-selling authors of the day, and realise he just might be able to do better if he tried. Horrified to really realise for the first time that he would have to wait another decade before he even had a chance to watch a film - much less a good one - and another half-century after that before the first telly would appear. What on earth did people _do_, in these days, besides work terrible hours and read the papers?

And he was utterly appalled, to discover that the medical world, and certainly not this horrible little East End clinic, had not yet wholly embraced Lister's theories regarding antiseptics, and the tantrum he threw in the clinic's surgical unit when he discovered the filthy condition of the shared surgical coats became the most talked-of event for weeks among his colleagues. He was at first mocked for his strictures, then maligned, and while that had died down after a bit there were still those who insisted he was mental (_mad_, according to the language of the day) and should not be permitted near a patient.

But no one could deny his success rate; and while he found himself awake of nights thinking despondently about how tied his hands were with the developments of the day, he could at least spend his days knowing he was doing good in a world of grateful people who would certainly have died of disease and poor conditions otherwise.

Still, was that all he was destined to do? Five weeks spent in what amounted to a personal hell, sentenced to a life of stagnation and poverty by a man in the government of the country he'd sworn to protect and defend? After all he'd gone through just before his disappearance (deportation, more like, he thought with wry humour), it was a bit anticlimactic, this. So utterly boring, and so terribly _empty_.

Days passed into weeks, and he began to reluctantly settle into what had to be his life for the next half-century or so (probably less, as life expectancy in these times was considerably lower than in his own). Any hope he'd possessed of being rescued by any means possible flickered and slowly died, as the weeks crawled by into two months, with no change.

He'd made a few good solid acquaintances in the meantime, however, which was surprising considering how reluctant he was to discuss his personal life with anyone (with good reason, obviously). Besides the usual staff at his charity clinic, there was a standing rotation of obviously more well-to-do physicians and nurses who volunteered their time on a regular basis in the clinic. It made him not quite lose all faith in humanity, to see such men (very few qualified women, unfortunately, he had to remember the sexist views of the period) give their time with no thought of reward or recognition for their services to the less fortunate segment of humanity.

John became friendly with the rotating medical staff, mainly because due to his advantage he could intelligently discuss medicine both old and new, and also due to the fact that he was very well-read; obviously a cut above the usual live-in in such situations. His self-confidence and knowledge apparently intrigued a few of the more intellectual physicians, and before long John found that he had actually made a few friends among them, despite his societal and verbal gaffes which were written down to simple eccentricity among the tolerant bunch.

One such gentleman, an amiable, slightly dense young intern named Stanley Myles, seemed to have a bizarre fascination with John, and while the young fellow was annoyingly chipper at times he really couldn't complain about the frequent offers to treat him to luncheon or a cup of coffee which John otherwise would not get. Accepting charity was repellent to him, but he unfortunately knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth at this point.

And so it was, some three months after his arrival in 1881, that he found himself opposite the younger man in a ridiculously overpriced bar just off Piccadilly Circus (Myles had insisted that he needed to get out a bit more, and had basically dragged him onto the scariest, most rickety Tube ride John had ever experienced), goggling at a drinks list that even in this time period was considered expensive.

"You are an odd one, Watson," the fellow chirped amicably as they shared a basket of crusty breads. "I mean, really, you just don't quite fit the mould, do you?"

John cleared his throat. "Yes, well. Afghanistan will do that to a man," he offered, falling back on his by-now standard excuse for his odd lapses in vocabulary or societal faux pas. He had done enough research to know he could likely buff his way through a wartime retelling to a civilian, though no veteran of the day would believe his out-of-date geography and battle knowledge.

"Afghanistan, really!" Myles's eyes shone with respectful excitement. "I had no idea it was so recent. Not to be rude in inquiring, mind," he hastily added, peering at John over the top of his wine glass as if afraid he'd stepped over some invisible boundary.

John smiled thinly, but genuinely. "Not at all."

"Where were you stationed, then?" the younger man asked curiously. "I cannot say that I know much about the whole mess other than what the papers have been reporting."

He knew he must tread lightly here, and so stuck with the answer he did know for fact still had existed back in this time period. "I was with the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers," he mentioned with a casual shrug.

Myles's eyes bulged out of his head. "And you escaped with just a limp?" he asked incredulously.

John winced internally; obviously not the best of stories if he wanted to keep a low profile. And the reminder of his limp, which had returned on his third day here, galled him, and the words came out more curt than he intended. "Er...yes. Was shot in the shoulder as well, that's what invalided me out actually."

"But there weren't very many survivors, were there - I did read about Maiwand in the papers. You are a lucky fellow, Watson!" (1)

"Indeed," he returned easily, and saved himself from a longer explanation by basically inhaling his pasta.

He appeared to get a bit more respect after that conversation, surprisingly - obviously the general consensus in those days was more supportive of war in general - and he suspected that the young man had spread the word around the clinic a bit, which had given rise to speculation about his current less-than-affluent circumstances. John let the rumours run their course, because it only benefitted him; people were no longer so prying, and were understanding if he refused to discuss his past.

Stanley Myles, unfortunately, was now like a terrier with a chew toy, and latched onto John at every opportunity. This would not be so terrible a thing, except that the young fellow seemed more perturbed by John's apparent poverty than John was - and summarily spent a good fortnight trying to set him up with every available acquaintance, chum, and kindly elderly the young intern knew, who might possibly have a spare room to let.

John allowed himself to be dragged to a few such interviews, mainly because he knew better than to discount any option - and because he knew that he would never be able to prove an identity in this era and so he'd probably have to find an ally of sorts if he ever hoped to live comfortably in the poverty-prevalent time period. Most of them were dull, aloof medical students with superiority complexes (which would be why they were still looking for a flatmate, John observed wryly to himself), and one was an artist who was so utterly bizarre that John told Myles in no uncertain terms to stop his platonic matchmaking if he knew what was good for him.

"But Watson, really! You simply can't spend the rest of your life in that hell-hole," the young man pleaded earnestly. "It's unforgiveable, that you aren't being pensioned enough that you can live decently. Come now, it's just one more - surely you can give me that?"

"Only if you are planning on footing the bill for luncheon," John finally growled with little grace, mentally making a note to never again befriend young and far-too-concerned-for-other-people interns.

The beatific smile on the young man's face was not an encouraging sign, as he was as excitable as a hungry puppy, but John was a bit pleased at the opportunity to see what St. Bart's Hospital looked like back in 1881 - how many of his colleagues had that kind of historical opportunity? He could not help but smile at the knowledge that, regardless of his poor luck, he would at least have a firsthand opportunity to _live_ what he had only until now referred to as _history_.

Bart's was nothing like he remembered, obviously, and yet he recognized the impressive structure and felt a hint, just a hint, of familiarity spark around him and deep inside him as he walked - almost as if Time itself recognised him, that he did not belong, and yet accepted him anyway.

_And now I have officially gone 'round the bend, thinking like a ruddy Time Lord_, he thought ruefully, as he followed Myles through a set of double doors into what looked like a (for that time period, anyway) state-of-the-art chemistry lab.

A solitary young man was bent over a microscope in the far corner, and Myles gave him a gentle shove forward (not too hard, as John was still relying slightly on a cane) in the man's direction. With an encouraging nod, the youngster prodded an increasingly irritated John down the aisle to the student's table.

"Really, Myles, did I not tell you to desist from your infernal busybodying and leave me alone?" a strident voice called boredly, slightly muffled into the microscope. "This experiment is at a most crucial stage. And whoever you've got with you, for the last time - I am not interested in your attempts to find me a -"

John was just starting to wonder if he'd heard that voice somewhere before when they reached the edge of the table, and the young man looked up, wearing an expression of annoyance - one which then froze in shock along with his words, as their eyes met.

Myles waved an introductory hand between them.

"Doctor Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes," he chirped, utterly oblivious. (2)

* * *

(1) Again, ASIP and STUD were fairly similar and so it took very little tweaking to interchange details. My thanks for research goes to** Pompey**, the pre-STUD Watson expert extraordinaire.  
(2) Introduction quote from STUD


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

John thought he could be forgiven the embarrassing sound of strangled surprise that escaped him before he turned it into an awkward cough.

The Time Lord's eyes flashed briefly in amusement, as he laid a surreptitious finger to his lips for an instant. "Yes, yes, you've done your duty, Myles; now go annoy someone else for a bit, there's a good chap," he said breezily, turning back to his microscope. "I am certain that Dr. Watson and I are capable of having an unchaperoned conversation about rooming arrangements."

The young intern was unoffended, and after bobbing his head briefly with a hopeful grin to John, ambled back through the double doors.

Scarcely had they shut behind him when John more collapsed than sat into the nearest chair.

The alien swivelled away from the microscope, lips quirked in a smug grin. "Admit it, you are utterly taken aback, John," he declared with an air of complete self-satisfaction.

"I am!" He shook his head, still barely able to believe his eyes. "I assumed you had said good riddance and were halfway across the cosmos by now - it's been three months!"

His companion looked at first sad, then a bit mortified, and squirmed slightly in his chair. "Yes, well...about that. Erm. You see, time travel is not precisely an exact science. I have been..." he looked briefly to the side, and then continued hurriedly, "...a bit off in landing, before. This is actually the closest I've been in a while to my intent. Also I had no idea when precisely _you'd_ landed, you know. It is harder than it looks to track down one small human across all of space and time."

"You'll hear no complaints from me, Doctor," John commented wryly, ignoring the 'small' descriptor. "I have yet to acclimate myself to a world without Starbucks and launderettes. It is...utterly fantastic to see you!"

The Time Lord grinned at him.

"And what on earth have you done with your _hair_?" was John's next question, as he shook his head incredulously.

"Fashions of the time, I'm afraid," was the doleful reply, as the alien ran a hand over the heavily-slicked down mop, and then tugged helplessly at his necktie - _cravat_, John mentally corrected his vocabulary. "It is quite ghastly, isn't it?"

"A bit, yeah." John smiled. "I am glad to see you, you know."

"Yes, well." His companion cleared his throat nervously. "You may not be so pleased, when you learn all the facts, John."

"Doctor?"

"You had best get in the habit of calling me by my alias for the duration of our time here," the Time Lord advised. "I have no medical qualifications and that will be quite apparent to anyone who overhears your giving me such a title. I have no desire to attract undue attention."

"Yet you named yourself _Sherlock_?" John commented dryly, eyebrow raised.

"It's a long story, all right?" the Time Lord ran a hand through his hair again and then stood, buttoning up his coat as he did so. "And there are far more important things we have to discuss, John. Come along, we have an appointment in Central London."

John obediently trotted after his long-legged companion, his limp all but disappearing in the wake of this shocking new development. "Can't you just explain whatever it is on our way home?" he asked.

"That depends on what you call _home_, John," the alien said seriously, as they walked down the street to a more frequented thoroughfare. "And that is why I said you may not be so pleased to see me. Call us a cab, there's a good fellow?"

John blinked at the non sequitur, shrugged, and whistled shrilly. A horse-drawn two-seater trotted up to them a moment later, and they clambered aboard with what John hoped was minimal awkwardness.

"Baker Street," The Doctor called upward, and with a sickening lurch they began to move through what looked to be absolutely non-systematic London traffic.

"Baker Street?"

"Baker Street, John. I have...good news and bad news." The Time Lord's lips pursed in rueful aversion. "Which would you prefer to hear first?"

"The good news," John replied instantly, because after all how bad could the bad news be, if he'd been found by the only man who knew where he'd been sent?

"The good news is that I was able to locate you with a minimum of fuss. I was rather lucky to be able to pinpoint you in a city this size, but arranging a meeting took a bit more finesse and some assistance from our overeager young friend."

"About that - how _were_ you able to locate me?" John asked, interested.

The Doctor waved a hand dismissively. "Simple enough, once I'd pinpointed your basic time period; you are one of three people in this era in London who show traces of Vortex energy. Quite faint in your case, as your time in the TARDIS was never while she was in flight through the Vortex, but enough to be traceable with the proper dimensional scan and a bit of experimenting."

"Yes, right, well we don't all speak Star Trek, so what does that _mean_, exactly?"

"You have glowy stuff on you that makes my sonic screwdriver go beeeep," the Time Lord said dryly.

John laughed, genuinely, for the first time in many days. "All right, so the good news is that you found me and landed in the right time period...what's the bad news?"

The Doctor fidgeted, tugged at his cravat again. "Um," he said intelligently. "Well...the bad news is that...we can't leave."

John stared at him for several seconds, assuming he'd heard incorrectly, but the alien appeared genuinely regretful. Finally he exploded in a flurry of words fueled by sudden despairing fright, "You have a time-travelling spaceship - what do you mean, you can't get me home?"

"John, I told you that you might not be happy after I -"

"Explain," he demanded through clenched teeth, blood pounding in his ears.

"One reason, is that there are things that even I cannot do to disrupt the balance of time, John," the alien snapped sharply. "According to all records, you disappear without a trace on the night of October 12, 2011 - there is no confirmation of you ever showing back up in your proper time period. I cannot change history, John. You have, for all intents and purposes, already died by the time October 13 in your year 2011 comes around. The people you knew have not even been born yet, and will not be for another hundred years or so. I. Cannot. Change. That."

John paled, letting that sink in for a moment. "Why can't you just...alter it a bit?" he asked quietly. "History, I mean. It's not as if I'm some world leader who is going to shake the earth's political foundation if I disrupt a tiny detail in the Grand Scheme of Earth's history...why can't I just return and live in my proper time period?"

The Time Lord sighed, and looked down at his folded hands for a moment. Finally he looked up, meeting John's questioning eyes with regret, combined with a flinty determination that told the physician further pleas would be useless. "For one thing, because you would create a paradox that could in theory rip a hole in the fabric of time; messing with history is always a dangerous business. For another, Mycroft Holmes will not rest if you return, John. Not only will he either destroy you or both of us - but in addition, your return would change the course of history regarding the involvement of an alien race on your planet and the open acknowledgement of said alien race. But primarily," he continued seriously, "Because, John Watson, you are destined for something else, something in this time period. I cannot tell you more than that, because even I don't have room in my brain-attic for every single detail of every person's life and timeline."

"So you are going to leave me here," John said flatly, hoping his desperation and slight hurt didn't show in his voice.

"Ah...not precisely. I did say that was only one of two reasons why you can't go back," the alien hedged uneasily.

"And the other?"

"I might have had...some slight technical difficulties upon landing," the words tumbled out in an awkward rush, "which would make future flights through the Vortex a bit...dodgy, to try safely."

John blinked, a grin quirking at his lips despite the situation. "You broke down."

"A bit, yes."

"Your amazing, time-traveling ship _broke down_, in Earth's Victorian age."

"I believe I just said that," his companion growled, arms folding defensively across his chest.

"Wait, how are you going to fix her if we're stranded before the Age of Technology?" John asked, suddenly realising those implications. "We've barely cleared the Industrial Revolution!"

"I highly doubt I will be able to fix her." Something on the floor of the dingy cab seemed to be taking up the Time Lord's complete attention, and John cautiously moved a bit closer. "Certainly it would not be for some years, as I have no idea the substitutions for technology which I could build from this era's materials...besides, the old girl's a bit ill-tempered in her old age anyway...rather like me, actually..."

"Doctor," John said quietly, because something was not quite ringing true about the alien's story, "...how, exactly, did that powerful ship break down to the point that it stranded you here? Surely you have safeguards against such a thing, and you were only travelling through time, not space...it could not have been that difficult of a trip, unless there is something you are not telling me."

The Time Lord's head shot up in surprise. "Why would you think that?" he asked, attempting innocence and failing most miserably.

John rolled his eyes. "Tell me what happened, Doctor," he requested. "It looks like neither of us will be going somewhere any time soon."

* * *

The story unfolded slowly as they drove through a smog-filled London, the Doctor reluctantly giving out details as John asked pertinent questions.

"It's a bit hard to explain, Time," said the former, frowning. "Rather like a bit of string, is what I usually tell people - not a straight line at all. It can twist and turn and double back on itself, and wind itself around certain people or places..."

"And it can knot itself up sometimes?" John asked suddenly, a mental light bulb flashing.

The alien looked impressed. "Just so," he agreed, smiling. "And what happens to the tensile strength of a string when you knot it, just there before the knot?"

"That becomes the weakest point of the string," John supplied.

"Precisely. When Time becomes knotted up...well. Let us suppose my timeline is one such piece of string. One which is tangled up so badly by this point - I am centuries old, John, remember - that even I have a hard time making sense of it. But this particular time period, John; I have been here so many, many times that this era is fairly kinked and knotted up with my own timeline."

"So...trying to fly the TARDIS into the Victorian age...is like trying to force a piece of string through an already-tied knot?" John asked slowly.

"That's just about the precise problem, John. Well done." The Time Lord looked quite pleased at his comprehension. "It is nearly impossible to fly into such a knotted mess, as it goes against all safety protocols installed in the TARDIS, not to mention it is horrendously difficult to pinpoint a landing in such conditions. I had not anticipated just how difficult it would be, either for the TARDIS or for precision in locating the year I was aiming for..." His voice trailed off into an awkward silence, and John's blood suddenly ran cold.

"How accurate was your landing?" John asked quietly. "Just how long have you been stranded in this time period, Doctor?"

The Time Lord glanced away, out at the throng of humanity which pressed about them and their vehicle.

"Doctor?"

"Two years," was the quiet answer, and John stared at the man, aghast.

"Two _years_?"

"There was nothing to be done; it was as close as I could manage in those conditions - and I could not know when exactly you were going to arrive, John; I had hoped to land before you rather than after." The alien shrugged easily. "My early arrival enabled me to establish a relationship with the primary brain-behind-the-current-British-government, barter for my sanctuary in return for a few favours to be called in when needed, and with the man's help set up an alternate identity which would stand under severe scrutiny."

John shook his head, horrified at this new knowledge. "If it was that high of a risk - why on earth did you come back for me in the first place?" he exclaimed. "Surely you knew the chances when you embarked?"

"Oh, I did," the alien agreed cheerfully. "In fact, I was set on spending a bit of time in the Carina Nebula, watching baby stars being born - gorgeous sight, that - but the TARDIS, she would have none of it. The old girl can be quite adamant if she decides to be, you know." The Time Lord scratched his head sheepishly. "In fact...you could possibly say that she...kidnapped me."

John's lips twitched.

"It is not in the least bit funny!"

"Not at all," John managed, masking a half-hysterical giggle as a cough. Not that much of an act, as he had noticed the last few days had caused him to develop an almost constant urge to clear his scratchy throat due to the soot and grime in the air.

The Doctor sighed, stretching his long legs out before him. "She was rather old, anyway," he murmured with an audible tinge of regret. "So many centuries under her belt, the poor girl. It's no wonder she called it quits after that rough of a landing."

"She's not -"

"Oh, no, still quite alive," the alien hastened to reassure him. "Just a bit crotchety. And in no mood to go anywhere for quite a while, yet. And that's assuming I can fix her someday. No, for all intents and purposes, John - I am as much an exiled prisoner here as you are. I have no doubt," he added darkly, "that your precious Mycroft Holmes planned this quite carefully, as the most difficult time period in Earth's history for me to attempt to locate you."

John took all this in and sat quietly for a few minutes, watching the scenery change before them and trying to digest the information. Then he remembered Stanley's introductions in Bart's, and turned again to his companion.

"So...your name."

"What, Sherlock Holmes?"

"Yes - how on earth did that come about?"

"Well, it is simple enough. History and nomenclature have a dreadful habit of repeating themselves, John, and you might be shocked to learn that this time period also has a mastermind behind the government - by the same name as your nemesis in your own time period. No doubt the political bent is passed on through generations, though the ruthlessness of yours is not as pronounced in this time period's Mycroft Holmes. However, it was necessary to find a contact in the government so as to fly under the radar of an up-and-coming and far too eager Torchwood. Her Majesty Queen Victoria is not, shall we say, one of my biggest fans - and it was necessary to find a contact I can, if not trust, at least bargain safely with."

"So you found this time period's Mycroft Holmes and, what, agreed to do some espionage if required, in exchange for a new identity and sanctuary from...time-travelling bounty hunters or something?"

The Time Lord's eyes gleamed with amusement. "Already writing it up in your head, are you?"

John blushed. "I was only asking," he muttered in some embarrassment.

"And in essence you are correct. As to the name, it was merely the most simple solution. Mr. Holmes had a younger brother who died shortly after birth; it was no great feat to alter the records and emerge into society as a slightly eccentric younger sibling of an innocuous and totally unknown political genius. It is my rotten luck that the unfortunate young man had such a deplorable given name."

"Poor you," John agreed companionably, trying not to snigger. "Surely you have had aliases in the past, though? I cannot see you living for any length of time in a society simply being called 'The Doctor.'"

"I have rarely been forced to adopt humanity as a disguise, and on the occasions I did so I always took the name John Smith," the Time Lord returned unhappily.

John snorted, grinning. "Highly imaginative."

"And I couldn't very well have two Johns in the same household, communication with others would be unnecessarily complicated," he continued, shaking his head vehemently. "Most distracting. No, John, unfortunate as my unusual _nom de guerre_ is, it unfortunately is what I have gone by for two years now and I am growing accustomed to it."

"Half a moment, what do you mean, _the same household_?" John asked warily.

The Time Lord gifted him with a skeptical look. "Are you so set on remaining in a squalid charity mission for the remainder of your time here? Surely, no matter how distasteful my alien-ness is to you, you would prefer a decent bed and regular meals to the alternative?"

"You're... really offering me lodgings; that wasn't just a ploy to get Myles to re-introduce us?"

The Doctor - _Sherlock Holmes_, John hastily corrected himself in his mind - nodded, somewhat nervously. "I have a two-bedroomed flat in Central London, an ideal situation really. Board, utilities, and laundry included in the rent, which is paid for by my governmental 'brother.' The landlady does not particularly care for my eccentricities, but she is a fabulous cook and housekeeper, if a bit too motherly for my tastes. You will like her, John. And the TARDIS is safely stowed in the lumber room above the second-floor bedroom; far too many stairs for the dear lady to navigate, and completely safe place to keep a multi-dimensional ship. She is a bit lonely, I gather, but safe enough."

John slumped back in the cab's seat as the vehicle swayed and rattled alarmingly through the traffic, his mind whirling at the rapidity in his change of fortune. "I...am having a bit of trouble processing it all," he murmured.

Sherlock Holmes nodded sagely. "I can imagine it is a bit too much for your funny little human brain. But you will adjust, John; you are not an idiot, I would never be able to tolerate your presence if you were. At least not in comparison to anyone but myself, which is rather unfair, given your unfortunate specist disadvantage."

An eyebrow inched toward John's prematurely greying hair. "Two years in the politest society in history, and you still haven't broken the habit of backhanded complimenting," he observed without rancor.

"Nope," the Time Lord chirped happily, looking altogether too pleased with himself.

John brought a hand up to his face, pinched the bridge of his nose briefly, and then sat back in the seat with a sigh. "I really can't believe you've been stuck here for two years, just because you came back for me," he commented quietly, glancing sideways.

He received an eloquent shrug and a graceful wave of hand, a fastidious gesture that began cementing the new persona before him in his mind. The Time Lord looked the part of a fussy, well-to-do Victorian gentleman, and had John not known better he would never have suspected otherwise. "It could not be helped, Doctor. And while it would certainly not be my life of choice, it could certainly be worse. This is an exciting period in which to live, John - so much history is being made, _will_ be made, in the next thirty years or so."

"And then comes the first world war, and the Spanish 'flu," John muttered with understandable lack of enthusiasm. "Not to mention the rampant tuberculosis and God knows what else lurking in this horridly backward medical era..."

"Oh, I expect that long before you die of premature old age we shall have found a way to repair the TARDIS," the Time Lord replied cheerfully.

"And if we do not?" John asked pointedly.

"Well, then, Doctor Watson." Sherlock Holmes leaned toward him, eyes twinkling under the brim of his glossy hat. "Let us make ourselves unforgettable while we're here, shall we?"

.

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**FINIS**  
(or is it?)

* * *

_Thank you for taking this wild ride with me, dear reader, and I hope you enjoyed. I do have a whole set of head-canon for this universe that just didn't fit into the (epic) timeline here, and so I may revisit this if there's any future interest. Until then, thank you again for reading, and please remember to leave my artist a comment as well, if you can!_


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